


Mad Dog Song

by kyrilu



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Biblical References, Case Fic, Character Study, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02 Finale, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whether it’s listening to the dogs howl during a full moon, or taking penance from a visiting priest without feeling penitent at all, Matthew and Will have their own coping mechanisms.</p><p>Matthew and Will, post-S2, facing their ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I FINISHED THIS IN TIME FOR BROWNHAM WEEK. \o/ It’s finally fucking finished.
> 
> This fic was born out of my desire to write a fic where Will struggles to rebuild himself post-finale, gearing after Hannibal but working his way to happiness and recovery, while he bonds with the other survivors left behind (IT’S ALL I’VE EVER WANTED FOR HIM). This fic was also born of my desire to write a parallel journey for Matthew Brown, and see if I could figure him out with my own headcanons/fanon.
> 
> And, um, be warned: while it has its subtext, this fic is also very, very gen.
> 
> The full list of relationships in this fic besides Matthew/Will is: implied subtextual Hannibal/Will, unrequited Alana/Will, implied past Matthew/Francis Dolarhyde, implied background Ardelia Mapp/Miriam Lass (who are living out an unwritten h/c fic of their own, to be honest), background mention of Freddie Lounds/Wendy.
> 
>  **Disclaimer** : I tried to be semi-accurate on some law stuff, but I know there are errors - like, glaringly, the fact that [Matthew could testify about Hannibal.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_confession) I kept it in for Dramatic Story Reasons because I wanted Will and Matthew to both be witnesses. I’ve also sped up the length of Matthew’s trial for Andrew Sykes’ murder, among other things. I hope that my errors doesn’t bug any lawyer/paralegal/law student/etc. fannibals too much.
> 
> Many thanks to the anons who gave me legal advice! Any and all mistakes are solely mine, however.
> 
> My list of references that I used in this fic is [here](http://kyrilu.tumblr.com/post/92718186054/mad-dog-song-credits-inspirations).

The dogs gather on the front porch to sing at the full moon. It starts with Winston tonight, who sees the bright light in the sky, and howls. Then the noise spreads among the others in a ripple, a grapevine game. This is a language that even Will can’t fully understand, but he can grasp: after all, he knew that that one night, when they gathered on the porch and barked with urgency, was because of a predator in the woods, a predator that turned out to be Randall Tier.

He does not sit with a shotgun at his lap, even though he knows another predator - Hannibal Lecter - is out there in the world, somewhere. He sits on the splintering wood of his porch, feels the warmth of his dogs at his side, and feels himself slide into sleep.

He has not been able to sleep in his bed for the past few days. When he tries to, he thinks he can feel Lecter’s knife digging into his skin again. He sweats and sweats through extra bedsheets and towels until all he’s left with is his bare mattress, and there’s nothing but a _deluge_ of dreams that he doesn’t want to think over.

He once dreamed of seeing Hannibal Lecter beside a window, the light streaming past him, carving silhouettes across his body. He says Will’s name, and there’s red trickling all over Will’s face, his arms. It’s Abigail’s blood--has every drop of wine Lecter's given him been diluted with blood--?

Buster woke him when he screamed, licking his face and adjusting his body against Will so that his fingers fluttered onto the place where Randall Tier had wounded him. Will had flickered a weak smile at Buster, his hand tightening on tufts of fur.

So he decided to sleep outside, instead. It's like his childhood days in the South with his father, crouching in the woods in the yellowing evening and holding freshly caught fish over fire. The whisper of crickets and the winds and the grasses. He had one dog, then, a hound named Duke. He had to leave him when they moved again...

The dogs are still singing, full-throated noises that fill the air. They tremble with breaths between howls. Will’s hand reaches to hook onto the scar underneath Buster’s fur once again. He would sing with them if he could.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up to a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t open his eyes immediately - a sharp stab of apprehension in the bottom of his stomach; _who would the dogs not bark at?_ \- but relaxes when he feels the dimensions of the hand, the movements of it. It’s the same as when they pushed his glasses back to his eyes at their first meeting.

“Jack,” he says, blinking in the morning sunlight. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, and shrugs Crawford’s hand away.

“Do I need to ask you why you’re sleeping on your porch?” Jack says, his eyebrows raised, a nearly invisible smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Will lets out a sharp laugh. He tries to sit up, and groans when he realizes that it probably isn’t the best idea. The wood has left his back sore, despite the blanket he had brought out and the soft cushion of his dogs around him. Jack holds out his hand, but Will ignores it, clings to the edge of a window, and manages to stand, shakily.

One of the bigger dogs, Rocky, puts his nose into Will’s palm and supports him. Will smiles down at him briefly. He’s always suspected that Rocky used to be some type of assistance dog who somehow wandered all the way out here.

“Nightmares,” Will says to Jack, shortly. “More comfortable here. And I told you, Jack, I’ll be fine.”

It’s been nearly a month since Dr. Lecter had fled Baltimore. It’s been only a week since Will left the hospital.

Abigail is dead.

Two children. He’s lost two children because of Hannibal Lecter.

The FBI have whisked Alana off to protective custody. She had protested, but eventually relented. While Will doesn’t believe that Lecter would go after her, there’s still a risk. And there’s the matter of Lecter’s former patients, too. He had destroyed all of his records, meaning that’s there’s potentially dangerous people out there, unstable monsters behind masks who Lecter can orchestrate like a piece for his theremin.

Another Randall Tier.

(Another Will Graham, maybe.)

Will knows that they want to take him, too, but he doesn’t want to go into hiding. He likes it here. He knows Hannibal won’t come for him.

He knows that there’s another option, as well: to help, as if there isn’t the veritable army of the police and the FBI and the U.S. Marshals and Interpol on the lookout. And, of course, there’s last week’s episode of _America’s Most Wanted_. Media hysteria, which he knows has been lambasting the FBI for letting a serial killer slip out under their noses, letting him consult on his own case. Lecter’s face is everywhere: in the papers, on the news, on wanted posters; there’s an outstanding arrest warrant on his head.

Will is not going to run after Lecter. Will avoids eye contact with Jack and touches Rocky behind his ears, stroking his black fur softly.

“I’ll be fine here,” he says again. “There hasn’t been any reporters knocking. I appreciate that you told them that I’m still in the hospital.”

Will looks at the sky, which is more white than blue. He says distantly, “Tell the media to focus more on Dr. Du Maurier. He’s used to being inconspicuous, to hiding while hunting. He may have already established multiple alternative identities for himself. She hasn’t. She’s a psychiatrist who hadn’t left her home for a long, long time. She could be memorable. I didn’t know her, but she might talk to more people than him. She’s a striking woman - beautiful. That will be noticed. You should also see if you can talk to any friends, family, former patients of hers to get an idea of who she is. Why did she run with him?”

He lets the question drag off. It’s hypothetical. He knows the answer. It’s almost the same as his reason, if he’d went.

He adds, for the sake of expanding more, “And I trust that you know his expensive tastes. Suits in his size. The coffee beans that he likes. How he arranged the flowers in his house and his office. Look for any purchases that add up to anything. He knows you’ll be looking for it, but going after his palate is worth a shot.”

Jack is watching him speak, something like sadness in his eyes. “We’ll catch him,” he says. “But the hospital ruse isn’t going to work forever. You can come back home later, Will. It isn’t a lifetime deal. We need you safe right now, and I know that you don’t want reporters to find you.”

Will considers it. He’ll be pulled out of town somewhere - close enough to Maryland, if he’s needed to testify - and they’ll put FBI tails on him, watching him. He knows that they’ll let him call Alana, call Jack, anyone he wants. They will be monitoring him, in case Lecter might contact him, on a turf that they have chosen.

Maybe it’ll be better. Being _away_ for awhile, out of this house which still has its history: the killing floor of Randall Tier, the site where Mason Verger had his face nearly torn apart by Will’s dogs, the place where Hannibal often brought dinner.

“Okay,” he says, finally. _Everything will be fine_ , he thinks. “I’ll go. As long as I can take my dogs.”

“That can be arranged,” Jack says, and he’s smiling again, that same smile that he had when he saw Will on the porch. “We’ll cut you loose if there’s any sign you don’t need us. We’ll get him, Will.” And his hand strays to the wound on the neck, where glass pierced. Will knows that he’s angry, that he has a reckoning that will take the place of Will’s own (a sad sorry extinguished vendetta; he’s just so damn _tired_ ).

Everything will be fine. Alana’s under protection, too, after all. He’ll call her tonight. He needs to hear her voice.

The last time he saw her was at Abigail’s funeral. She was crying, quietly, into the side of his neck when she hugged him, and he could feel his own tears wetting her black scarf. _It hurts so much to mourn for the second time, doesn’t it?_ she had asked.

“Thank you,” Will says to Jack before he leaves.

He wants to sleep again. He wants the moon to come out again and for the dogs to howl. The sunlight is pleasantly warm, nothing like the rain that had fell on the night that Hannibal Lecter left Baltimore. But he needs to pack. He stands out on the porch for awhile longer, lingering at the doorway. He feels the sun on his skin, feels the dogs leave wet kisses at his feet, waiting to be fed, and then he goes back inside.

 

* * *

 

He wonders if he’ll be able to fish anywhere they take him. His tackle box is heavy, laden with fishing flies and the different components to make them, so he decides to leave it, even though he knows that having it is more than just for fishing. It’s a distraction: weaving the thread and hooks when he needs to keep his hands busy, concentrating on the motions.

He forces himself to finish packing. He doesn't bring much, and later realizes that he brought more things for the dogs than for himself. Collars, leashes, toys, dog food.

He calls Alana when he's done.

"They're going to be moving me," Will tells her. "I don't know where, but it looks like we're both in hiding now."

"It's a strange vacation," Alana agrees, keeping her tone light. Will tries to imagine what she's doing now: he hears a soft rustling sound that might be a hairbrush. He pictures her glancing at herself in the mirror; her eyes and the gloss of her hair and the way her face might've softened when she heard his voice.

"It's overkill," she continues. "But... I almost think I need it. A fresh start, a new place. I don't have to be grading papers. There's no one asking me about him. It helps you _forget_ for awhile _._ You might feel that way, too, Will."

"I don't think I could ever forget," Will says. He shakes his head as if Alana could see him. "I...he's in my dreams. I see Abigail die over and over again. And me - I got so close to him, Alana. He killed me."

And it's like a dance, how he moves, his movements set to piano. Will almost caught him, but Lecter had alighted away to the next dance, dropping the masquerade.

And then Will says with a fervency that surprises him, a whisper, " _He's insane._ "

This is a definition that is not legal insanity, that is not a psychiatric disorder that you can name. Hannibal Lecter is insane in a sense of the word that measures magnitudes. This is a definition that is hypocrisy considering that it's Will Graham speaking, a man who understands monsters and slips into their minds. Will has always objected to calling the people he chases crazy or evil. But Hannibal Lecter is insane.

"I know, Will," Alana says. She knows what he's trying to say. It's indescribable, that subtle feeling of trust and love and dependence and the vague sensation of the knife starting to slide in. You can't play the devil without him playing you.

Will doesn't hear her hairbrush moving across her head any more.

She tells him with a quiet fierceness, " _You're a good person, Will._ We both are. We survived. I know that you think you're the same as him, but it's just another weapon, how you're able to think like him. We both used weapons we didn't want and wouldn't have normally used."

She adds, softly, "I wish I had been lying there, bleeding besides Abigail with you. I wish my last memory of her alive wasn't of her pushing me out that window. I wish I could tell her that I don't blame her - I could see the guilt in her eyes when I fell."

 _Alana_ , Will thinks. _Abigail_ , he thinks next.

He cradles the phone closer to his ear. He wants to tell her that he loves her, that Abigail would understand, but he doesn't.

 

* * *

 

During the car ride - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Will was told, about two hours away from Baltimore but crowded enough to be a good hiding spot, with the added benefit of a local FBI field office - he reflects over the conversations he had today.

An FBI agent is at the wheel, another beside him. Will is behind them holding his two duffel bags, pretending that they're the weight of his dogs pressing against him. He knows that they'll send for the dogs soon to join him, but he's been depending on them so much recently, needing to stop and let them lick his fingers, to sit in his lap and settled against his limbs. Somehow it's these dogs that make him feel human, human in the way that Alana called him good, even though she doesn't know how he'd told Hannibal he wanted to kill with his bare hands, and Hannibal had looked so pleased, so proud.

This is when he realizes that none of them ever said Hannibal Lecter's name out loud. In this world where the headlines are blaring _Hannibal the Cannibal_ , _the surgeon of death, the devil's doctor, the Chesapeake Ripper_ , there are three people who have laid in puddles of their own blood because of him and don't dare say his name to each other.

The fourth is dead, and Will had stood by her grave waiting for him to come, and he hadn't. He’d come back to mutilate a corpse that he thought was Freddie Lounds; he had waited for Will, to confront him about his betrayal before he left, close and touching and an undone Judas kiss between them; but he values his freedom over a goodbye to their dead daughter, who had choked when he cut her neck - _he who giveth._

 

* * *

 

This isn't a heavy duty Witsec protection deal. It's FBI, a temporary move, a name change, and two shadows at Will's back.

A small house in a busy residential area has been rented by the FBI for him. If they had gotten an apartment, Will wouldn't have been able to bring the dogs.

He knows that he can't sleep on the front porch here, but he still thinks about it.

This house's previous occupants have a bed covered in dusty blue sheets, which Will collapses onto, and somehow, he doesn’t dream this night. Somehow, this night is peaceful oblivion: an empty house, a waning moon. He knows that the dead have followed him from the Chesapeake, but they don’t speak tonight.

He wakes up in the morning with the memories painful and clear in his head, like a spool of fish wire unraveling to cut his fingers. He’s pinpointed the moment where Hannibal knows that Will betrayed him: the impression of Freddie Lounds pressed against Will’s hair, his clothes. Will _smiles_ like a fierce mad hysterical dog, a grin into the side of the pillow, and he laughs.

He forces himself to get up, shaking off the hysteria. He dresses. Makes the bed. Starts to put a comb to his hair, but stops, because he’s not doing that anymore, he’s not going to let him in. He glances at the newspaper that a messenger had left in front of the house, but doesn’t bother to pick it up.

He eats breakfast - a granola bar that he’d stuffed into one of his duffle bags, two gulps from a plastic water bottle - and then calls a number that the bureau had left him. While the phone rings at the other end, he takes in his surroundings: this house’s little kitchen, smelling faintly of cinnamon, and a bowl of fake fruit on the counter.

A man picks up the phone, and Will tells him that he’ll be coming in this morning. It’s a short conversation, but Will knows it’s important. He needs a job when he’s here.

The black car is parked beside his house. Will raps his knuckles on the tinted window of the driver’s seat, and tells the agent that he’s going out to work. He’s taking the bus, then the subway. He’s not going to use them as his chauffeurs; that’s unnecessary.

The driver nods, and when Will starts to walk, he knows that they’re following at a distance.

 

* * *

 

The car garage is noisy: the sounds of tools whirring and clanking and rattling. There’s one car parked inside, which a man is busy working on, not glancing up from the popped up hood.

Will passes a shelf of tires, shining hubcaps reflecting his face, and as he continues walking, hears rock music from a stereo.

When he shakes the owner’s hand, his hand comes out with the thin sheen of engine grease. It’s familiar. He used to help his father fix boat motors, and he had been taught how to deal with their old car as well, learning how to handle tools.

It’s comfortable to go back to these things. Grease and sweat and his hands beginning to form calluses. Despite all the machinery here, there are no pendulums that make him lose himself; there is nothing at all to push him farther and farther and farther.

 

* * *

 

On his lunch break, the radio brings up something unexpected.

The announcer, a gruff scratchy tone: “I’ve managed to get into touch with the TattleCrime news reporter Freddie Lounds, who’s told me that she knew the wanted serial killer - ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. She’s currently under FBI protection, having been falsely reported dead to avoid Lecter from going after her, and she has quite the story to tell.”

And it’s Lounds’ voice, all right, that answers: “Hello, Jim. Thanks for taking my call. I’ve been dying to get word out what’s going on. The FBI won’t let me publish anything yet, sadly enough. I’ve got _pages_ of the real story, the entire story, that the world hasn’t seen. I could make a novel out of it, you know. I think I will.”

The announcer: “But they let you call?”

Lounds laughs. “Oh, no. It’s a bit unscrupulous on my part. I begged them to let me see my girlfriend, and Wendy slipped me a cellphone. I need to get the record straight, Jim: I’m alive, and I played a part in this gruesome mess.”

The announcer is about to ask a question, but Lounds interrupts, “Let me start. I’ve been thinking about what to say for days. Taking notes. I don’t want to forget.

“I’ve been going along with the FBI this whole time. Even if I’ve had my disagreements with them, I listened to federal investigator Will Graham and Agent Jack Crawford. I didn’t publish anything. I went to the safehouse that they sent me to. I didn’t cause a stir when they told me I couldn’t let Wendy know what was going on. Even if she saw pictures of what was supposed to be my mutilated _corpse_ in the papers.

“Hannibal Lecter is a monster. That’s undisputed. I don’t need to repeat all those articles we’ve read about his basement of hell. But this investigation is a monster of its own.”

 _It’s a very dramatic statement_ , Will thinks wryly, and the volume of Lounds’ voice rises.

“The FBI let people die,” Lounds says, with anger. “They _knew_ that he was the Ripper, but there were still more deaths. I’ve been hearing this allegation in the news everywhere, and I’m confirming that it’s one hundred percent true. The attempted murder of Mason Verger. The death of his two guards: Deogracias and Tommaso. Maybe even more, because I think they’re still checking his refrigerator. All of this happened when I was in their custody, while they knew he was dangerous. It’s not merely unprofessional. It’s negligent homicide. They’re as responsible for these murders as much as him.

“Abigail Hobbs was _alive--_ ”

Lounds catches her breath, a crackle of radio noise. _Oh,_ Will thinks. _This is why she’s..._

It’s the one unlikely thing that seems to bind them together. Abigail Hobbs. They are not remembering her as her father’s accomplice, the Minnesota Shrike’s lure, but a lonely and lovely and strong girl who was so close to surviving. Four of them bleeding, lying on pools of their own blood that night.

With a quick motion, Will changes the station. He doesn’t want to hear this. Lounds’ anger isn’t just blame directed at the FBI, but guilt. She thinks she could have saved Abigail if she had published her piece earlier, if she hadn’t followed their orders. If she could’ve forced the FBI into arresting him before anything more had happened. _They’re as responsible for these murders as much as him._

There are so many ways this sorry play could have happened. If, if, if. (Lecter washing the blood off Will’s hands as if that could mean fucking anything.)

Will goes back to work. He fades into the background of the car garage.

 

* * *

 

On the way to the subway, Will melts against into the blurred crowd of people walking by. Tourists, business people, children, people strolling by on their own paths. It’s funny how alone you could be in the middle of everything, the hubbub and the hardscrabble and the chatter.

Maybe you need the noise to forget. He remembers how loud his dogs had howled.

He wants to pause and close his eyes, to absorb the rush. He’s Will Graham and he’s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His body language can shift to adopt the little tics of those around him. His mind alternates between being clear and cloudy, as if storm clouds have gathered and his head is cluttered with the force of them. The place where Hannibal stabbed him sometimes feels like it’s bleeding again, his own personal stigmata.

 _Will I be able to do it?_ he asks himself now, for the first time, a moment in time lingering in the street. _Will I be able to look him in the eye, even if I’m being called crazy, and tell a court what he’s capable of?_

The moment passes. Will continues his walk, thinks, _Yes._

 

* * *

 

His dogs are waiting for him when he returns, joyfully jumping and running, nearly knocking him off his feet. Winston puts a wet, sloppy kiss on the side of his wrist, and Rocky nudges his waist as if he needs support to stand. Will pats each one of them, saying each of their names out loud. He has a feeling that they didn’t enjoy the ride to Pennsylvania, cooped up in a truck.

They can’t howl here. Not in the city, a place far away from that isolated field of a sea in Wolf Trap, Virginia. But they still help him sleep, furry mounds heaped on top of his bed, curving around him like a coat. When Will reaches out with his hand, his fingers curl against Buster’s scar.


	2. Chapter 2

There is a Catholic priest who comes to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane once in awhile. Several months ago, Matthew had respectfully greeted him _Hello, Father_ and escorted him into the hospital. The priest gives penance in the privacy room to any patients that request him. Patients, of course, who are coherent enough to handle it, that is. The priest's name, Matthew remembers, is Father Gregory Sarr, and this evening his frock is red, his dark skin fitting against the color. Today must be the feast day of some martyr that Matthew can’t quite remember.

Father Sarr doesn’t seem to recognize Matthew across the table, who is now clad in prison coveralls and wrists handcuffed in chains. It’s very funny: how a change of clothing can make so much a difference, his old scrubs having made him seem so natural to the environment, so invisible. Matthew’s good at that. The little touch of a lisp is a borrowed one and it enhances the act.

The chains rattle when Matthew mimes a truncated sign of the cross in the air, unable to touch his forehead, his chest, his shoulders in a flexible succession. He mouths to himself softly, _In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit._ He knows that he must appear to be one of the more balanced ones here. He can see the quiet patience on the priest’s face.

“Forgive me, Father,” he says, “for I have sinned. It has been two years, four months, and one week since my last confession.”

He can remember the date well. The last time was at the chapel of another hospital, the day when he fled. His priest at the time was a white haired elderly man, whose glasses reflected light through the screen.

Matthew says, “These are my sins. I have killed, and tried to kill, Father, for the sake of idolatry. This is not the first time I’ve done it.” He closes his eyes, sees the blue of Will Graham’s eyes on the back of his eyelids. “It’s something I can’t stop doing. It seems there’s always someone that I love. Someone I want to prove myself to. I don’t know if I regret it. There’s a...cold emptiness that I can’t understand. The man I killed. I think he was my friend.”

Father Sarr seems to unconsciously back away from the table between them, but the patience on his face is still there. “I see,” he says. “You know what you’ve done is wrong, as dictated by the fifth commandment. Murder - to take a life, especially from a man who trusted you - is a grave sin. But the Lord forgives all sins in time.”

And he tells Matthew the story of the two thieves on the cross besides Jesus, one criminal that was rebuked and the other that was forgiven. Father Sarr says gently, “For there to be forgiveness, you, yourself, must regret. You must realize that this love that would drive you to do such a thing is a false love. The love that God demands from all of us is nothing like that. _Love is patient, love is kind._ _It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves._ ”

“That’s what I wanted,” Matthew says. “To protect him by killing.”

“But that is not preservation. Did he ask you to do it?”

Matthew lets out a soft sigh. “The first time, no. But the second time, the one where I tried and failed, yes. There’s something _different_ with the both of us, Father.”

“That was wrong of him,” Father Sarr says. “This man that you idolize is responsible for this sin as much as you are, son.”

“As David told Joab,” Matthew concedes, nodding. “Yeah. He told me. And he didn’t admit it to me, but he was in so much _pain._ I bet he still is right now. The one I tried to kill made him like that. He feeds on pain, just how he feeds on everything else.” He can’t stop the smile darting on the corners of his mouth.

He says, “There will be a passing moment when the world finds out what happened when I failed, Father. And they will sin, too. They will think: _He should have let him die._ And my idol, because of his pain, will think about it more than the rest of the world, more than he will ever admit to himself: _He should have let him die._ Even if I have sinned, it’s worth it. I gave him my love, a momentary hope. _He should have let him die._ ”

His hands flutter into a folding position, into prayer, and he whispers, “And that is why I cannot bring myself to truly repent.”

 

* * *

 

He is left to his penance in his cell, murmuring the prayers he was instructed to under his breath. He wonders if he’ll ever fill his empty space. At times, when he’s running hot, wanting to kill for them, it feels like his tattoos have expanded on his skin, black ink covering the surface and shaping him into something new. A dragon, a stag, a wild beast of some kind. But this is only on the surface of his skin. The outside, not the inside.

Father Sarr had looked at him with a heavy sadness and said, “Son, I cannot force you to abandon your love. For all the sins that it makes you commit, your love is your own. Love is always strong, especially in isolating places like these. But the ‘cold emptiness’ you spoke of is because of this love. Stealing life, or attempting to, will not make warmth and companionship, and it will not lead to salvation. This is not confession or reconciliation unless you make it. You know that you have sinned. You must find your own will. You must trust in yourself and in God. He will forgive you, as He forgives all things, but the onus of penance is on you alone.”

And he had told Matthew to pray, to think of the friend that he killed, to think of life he had almost taken. Matthew had said, _Thank you, Father,_ and recited his act of contrition, almost inaudible in the void of the privacy room.

This session of reconciliation, Matthew thinks, is very much like the contrasting legal definition of a confession versus an admission. In the first, a person displays signs of remorse. Of guilt. In the second, there’s no trace of remorse at all.

There’s something _different_ \- he doesn’t want to think _wrong_ \- with Matthew Brown. He knows this. His fingers stray toward his stomach, tracing one of his tattoos through fabric as if he can see it. Next to the tattoo is the scar, the bullet wound, that Jack Crawford had given him. Everything’s on the surface: his masks and his wounds and his transformations. Nothing tangible inside.

Over and over again: _Glory be to the Father and to the Son and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen._ He thinks of: copying the way Francis Dolarhyde holds his gun, and shooting. Then he thinks of cutting off the bailiff’s ear to match the pictures: _I thought I would exonerate you._ And then this is a fire for Francis and Graham both. This is not a thought about how Andy Sykes smiled at him (not the ragged Glasgow one), and liked to discuss gruesome and grisly trials in a fascinated tone, liked to take pieces of evidence and spread them carefully on the table…

 _Glory be to the Father and to the Son and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen._ He thinks of: Hannibal Lecter on his pseudo-gallows: the Chesapeake Ripper, the doctor of death, the cannibal. He knows what he is, even if there’s no real word in existence for him except _monster_ , a twisted sort of devil thing. Matthew wishes he could have that depth of understanding and power and grace, to take on the outside and inside of the Chesapeake Ripper, to have his murders as his own. He was so close.

Over and over again. The black ink of imitation, of idolatry, of emulation is crawling up his arms and his neck and his face. This is what makes him crazy and empty, or maybe it’s the craziness and emptiness that makes him imitate and idolize and emulate. Chicken-or-the-egg. Or rather, hawk-or-the-egg, if he’s staying with that old metaphor.

The prayers lull him to sleep. He dreams of little birds diverging on him, pecking his eyes out. _But Will will come and fight_ , he tells himself in a brief lucid moment. In the end, despite his monstrosity, Hannibal Lecter is a little bird and Will Graham will come back. Not to save Matthew, because of course Matthew doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things, but for the sake of finally ending this strange and fatal saga.

He hopes that he’ll be there when Graham does. He hopes that when Graham figures out who the hell he is - federal investigator or murderer or someone who wants to win or someone who just wants to disappear into his imagination - Matthew might figure out something about himself, too.

 

* * *

 

He’s in the privacy room the next day as well - it is a visit that he’s been expecting, a visit that will have a sense of catharsis to it, unlike yesterday’s reconciliation. There is a man with salt-and-pepper hair waiting for him, wearing a black suit and sporting a neatly trimmed beard. A thick folder, bulging with papers, is on the table. The man very much looks his part. Matthew smiles at him.

There’s a small recorder on the table. The man sees Matthew glance at it, and gives him a nod of affirmation. _It’s on._ He reads Matthew his rights in a bland, easy manner.

“Well, well,” Matthew says. “You must be the prosecutor. I’m honored.” He doesn’t bother with his lisp. He’s as honest in mannerism with this man as he was with Father Sarr.

The prosecutor smiles back at him, a disarming wide grin. He doesn’t look at all intimidated at the shackled Matthew across the table. He merely watches him with alert eyes, his legs crossed, his fingers tapping on his folder of papers. He says, “I’m Ettore De Angelis. I’ve been with the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force since the very beginning. And you, Mr. Brown, might be able to help me end this.”

“You sound like a man who doesn’t hold any grudges,” Matthew says. “I bet it pissed off the Maryland staties that the FBI had their own suspect for a long time and didn’t share. _I_ even knew before them.” He’s been getting the newspapers here. He knows what the media’s nattering on about.

“To be fair, Mr. Brown,” De Angelis says, not rising to the bait, “there were only two individuals in the FBI who genuinely suspected Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Lecter is very good at hiding his tracks. He worked with them - with us - on his own case.”

“But he isn’t good enough,” Matthew says, and makes a thoughtful humming noise. “But, you know, to work your magic, you’ll have to catch him first, Mr. De Angelis. It could take years before you get your hands on him. He killed FBI agents, didn’t he? A federal prosecutor will call dibs.”

Matthew has a decent working knowledge of the law. It came with his job as an orderly; it came with having befriended a bailiff; it came with having been locked up in places with free time and access to books and newspapers. It's useful, when it comes to Matthew's inclinations.

“We will catch him,” De Angelis says, firmly. “And he’ll go down for each and every murder that he’s committed in this state, regardless of jurisdictional order. He’s hurt a lot of people.”

“Idealism’s good,” Matthew says, and he smiles again. He can tell that it’s bothering De Angelis, though. This is a high-profile case, and whoever goes first and goes big might be able to play the ‘Trial of the Century’ angle, winner takes all in acclamation and publicity. He asks, “What do you want from me, Mr. De Angelis?”

“It’s about what you mentioned earlier, Brown. You knew before everyone else. You knew he was the Ripper.”

“Of course I did. So did Will Graham, but nobody listened to him then.”

“You did, and tried to kill Lecter.”

“Allegedly,” Matthew says. “It’s Hannibal the Cannibal, Mr. De Angelis. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be talking to you without my attorney - that is a _hilarious_ expression, Mr. De Angelis, and no, it wasn’t a real request, so you can relax - but that seems like the sort of thing that will get me hailed as a folk hero. What some might call self-defense from a dangerous serial killer. I’m going to walk.”

“But not for committing the murder of Andrew Sykes,” De Angelis says.

“Allegedly,” Matthew repeats. “Who was killed in the same manner as Judge Davies, a confirmed victim of Dr. Lecter. The publicity and the villainization of Dr. Lecter is all the rage right now. He is the devil, the embodiment of evil in a fashionable wealthy therapist with a strange appetite.”

He says, “I know what you want from me. I don’t think there’s anything that you can offer me.”

De Angelis crosses his arms. His face is a mixture of exasperation and amusement. “Mr. Brown, I am not your enemy. I was hoping to establish relations with you early on, rather than a sudden subpoena. I need to know if you know anything useful, during that night where you tried to hang him. Whether he admitted anything or not. Tongues can be loose when they’re on the brink of death.”

Matthew laughs out the _Allegedly_ this time, his eyes crinkling. He thinks that he likes De Angelis, the ping-pong, half-playful nature of their conversation which seems to almost flow. “All right, Mr. De Angelis. There was...something of an admission. I can tell you it in full the next time, and that’s what I can tell a jury, but it comes down to two little things: the dilation of his pupils and his insistence that Mr. Graham didn’t commit the murders he was accused. I will not be the best of witnesses. You know my mental health history and my record; you know what I’ve been charged for; and when it all adds up, he did not explicitly tell me who he was - but, fine. I can tell a jury about the night when I nearly hung the devil.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Brown,” De Angelis says. “We need every little thing we can get about the face of Dr. Lecter as the Chesapeake Ripper. He presented himself as cultured, law-abiding. You have a different view of him.”

Abruptly, Matthew says, “Did you ever eat lunch with him, Mr. De Angelis? Did he cook custom-made meals or gourmet food for the task force, one afternoon? Mystery meat and cheese?”

“No,” De Angelis says, and looks appropriately appalled.

“Lucky,” Matthew says. And then he asks, “Have you seen Will Graham yet?”

“Not yet,” De Angelis says. “The FBI have him in protective custody.” From his terse tone, Matthew surmises that they’ve got multiple witnesses in protective custody. The media, of course, has referenced Freddie Lounds, but he wagers that Alana Bloom, who visited Will Graham so often, who was the other fatally injured victim in Lecter’s house, is another.

“But I will see him, eventually,” De Angelis adds.

“He’ll be your star witness,” Matthew says. Despite any doubts about who or what Will Graham is, Graham’s going to be here for this case; he’s going to be important. “When you see him, tell him I wish him good luck. Tell him that I look forward to seeing him again.”

 

* * *

 

After leaving the army, Francis Dolarhyde had wandered around the globe. _Hong Kong_ , he had told Matthew. _England._ It was in England where Francis first became aware of William Blake: a painting of Satan with rebellious angels gathered around him; a painting of the angel Michael predicting Jesus’ crucifixion to Adam; a painting of Eve and the serpent, the snake golden and long, its lithe body spiralling besides Adam.

He tells all of this to Matthew in the psychiatry ward of a Boston hospital. Francis was voluntarily in for his PTSD, the occasional sharp, shock flashes of memory and the pull of nightmares. Later, it will be known that there’s something _else_ going on with Francis besides his PTSD lapses, but of course, not yet. He’s just a vet with muscled arms and chest, a man with a lisp and a tendency to be almost forgettable.

Matthew’s in, at the time, for an unspecified personality disorder. He’s the violent kid who steals things, burns things, and can’t bring himself to care about anything. He’s not violent as in a foul-mouthed heavy-handed thug, a typical wannabe hoodlum. Instead he has a quiet simmering anger against forces he can’t fathom, released in bursts of arson or burglary, and a resigned acceptance whenever he’s in and out of hospitals and prisons.

It’s Francis who breathes life to his dormant sense of grandiosity.

It’s strange that they become friends, but somehow, they did.

Matthew carefully imitates how Will Graham used his imagination in his cell, eyes shut, sitting in his cot while the rest of the world fades away. He remembers--

 _It smells the same._ The smell of a hospital, disinfectant and sterile cleanliness. The sound of carts rattling by, and the sound of doctors’ coats and nurses’ scrubs rustling. Matthew Brown and Francis Dolarhyde are in a wing of the psychiatry ward, ignoring the television displaying a baseball game in favor of conversation.

“The Museum of Fine Arts,” Matthew says, craning to see a pamphlet that Francis holds out to him. “That’s why you’re here. They have William Blake paintings, too?”

Francis nods. He still doesn’t make eye contact with Matthew, despite the fact that they’ve known each other for a week. Speaking slowly as usual, to talk around his lisp, he says, “They don’t have the complete collection for _Paradi_ \-- for the poem written by John Milton. But they have about nine of them.”

Matthew looks down at the pamphlet. There’s a small reproduction of _Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve_ on one of the flaps: pen, watercolor on paper, 1808 _._ The style is bizarre to him, bare flesh and luscious lines. Satan is speaking softly to the serpent who will later be Adam and Eve’s downfall. He is jealous of their garden, this voyeur of a fallen angel, and Matthew thinks he can appreciate the illustration at some level, knowing the Bible stories ever since he was young.

“I wonder how it would be like,” Matthew says, “to see all of them. Travelling.” He’s never been outside of Massachusetts before: this place is the universe to him. His mother died several years ago. He’s never known his father, but according to their neighbors, he was a Southie man to the bone.

He gives Francis his pamphlet back, and asks, “Do you have a favorite? Where is it?”

Francis nods again. There’s a strange passion on his face, now. “In D.C. I haven’t been there, but I’ve seen a reproduction.” He looks flustered for having said _seen._ Angry at himself. He’s fairly good at hiding the sibilants, but he occasionally slips up.

“It’s fine, Francis,” Matthew says, and his voice is projecting Francis’ lisp back at him. It’s not mocking or taunting, merely something he can do: mimicry.

Francis’ face is flushed. “Don’t--”

“It’s a thing I do,” Matthew tells him, quickly. “I’m not making fun of you. It’s just a thing. It - it relaxes people I talk to, sometimes, when you throw their own speech patterns back at them. I can do it with my posture, how I stand. It’s a trick.”

He adds onto that, “I don’t care that you talk like that. Of all the screw-ups we’ve got in here, a lisp is the last thing to worry about. I told you. I can do it back at you. I’m the strange one.”

Francis doesn’t seem convinced. Still mad at himself. (Yesterday, he had shown Matthew a small reproduction of William Blake’s _Circumcision_ and muttered something about his grandmother.) His eyes are dark and cold whenever his lisp is brought up, focused determinedly on a point beyond eye contact, beyond softness.

Francis Dolarhyde yells in his dreams about war. Other dreams - dreams that he avoids talking about during group therapy, and, Matthew suspects, even during one-on-one sessions - he just cries, mute, without any tears on his cheeks.

It’s the most incorrect assumption in the world to say that he’s crying because of sadness. Rather, he’s crying because of _rage._

Matthew never stops to comfort him, mostly because he knows that if Francis was in his position, he wouldn’t. He would just roll over and go back to sleep, his mind left to its warped devices.

\--The memory breaks here. It’s a good place to stop, Matthew decides. The memories that happen next with Francis Dolarhyde are more haphazard. More disjointed. He had lost track of himself for awhile, trailing in Francis’ wake. _What were their names?_ Matthew asks himself. _What were their names, again?_

For not the first time, nor the last, Matthew’s fingers play against minute places where his tattoos lie.

 

* * *

 

He had picked Will Graham because he can do it, too. He had recognized it: the shared penchant for mimicry, even if it hadn’t really been played out in corpses, even if he isn’t a killer. He had realized it immediately when he saw Graham. Matthew had realized that he isn’t one of a kind.

For example: Hannibal Lecter is very still, in a way that others are not. He seems serene, elaborate, composed. He's like that during every visit to Graham. There's something graceful and reptilian about him. His face is made up of hints of emotions, as if they are carefully chosen for each moment.

Will Graham, whose fingers are usually twitching at his side, whose eyes are usually cast on the ground, stills. Every gentle rise and fall of his limbs is not his own.

Graham can control it, and he cannot control it, to different degrees. Brain and body language. He holds onto a sense of identity and of good, even if he does struggle.

Matthew doesn’t know what he holds onto.

 


	3. Chapter 3

He still has his old cell phone in case Hannibal Lecter ever calls. Will has been advised to not use it, so there's less of a chance of the number being leaked to the press, compromised, voicemails and texts clogging the inbox.

The new cell phone that the FBI has given him only has six numbers on it: his employer at the car garage, Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, the FBI field office in Philadelphia, and his two bodyguards. It’s a small list, practical, but Will wistfully remembers the days when Beverly Katz used to send him random texts, whether it’s little updates about a crime scene or an amusing comment or a cheerful greeting.

He doesn’t expect to receive a call from Margot Verger.

“How did you get this number?” he says, when he hears her voice on the other end, that slow drawl.

“I wouldn’t ask that, Graham,” she replies. “It’s best if you don’t think about it. I think this is classified as a _security breach._ ”

Will can’t help but bark out a chuckle. “It would be their second security breach in days.”

“I heard about that,” Margot says. “Lounds called that radio station. She’s an interesting woman. That was fearless of her, bad mouthing the FBI like that, when they’re ones protecting her. It’s a pity she’s already taken.”

Will chokes, tries to disguise the noise as a cough.

Margot says, “That was a joke.”

“I know,” Will says, with a sigh. He paces, aimless, in the house’s stark living room, taking the occasional half-turn to avoid the dogs around him. “Why did you call me, Margot?”

“Well,” Margot says, “it’s commiseration. To see how you’re doing ever since our therapist has been unmasked to the public as a cannibalistic serial killer. So: how are you, Graham?” At the question, her tone is less blunt, less sarcastic, hedging close to genuine concern. “The papers have been saying that he gutted you. You’re supposed to still be recuperating in the hospital now, actually.”

“He gutted me,” Will agrees. “But I’m fine. Functioning. New job, new house, new town. The FBI let me bring my dogs.”

“I’m happy that you’re more fond of them than my brother is.”

“Your brother,” Will repeats. Mason Verger laughing and demented, getting ripped apart while Hannibal looked on, amused. That debacle: it had used Will’s dogs as much as it used the Vergers and Will Graham, parts of a game where each player had their own grim roles. “How are _you_ , Margot?”

“I’m fine. Functioning,” Margot says back at him, which, Will supposes, is fair enough. Their recent scars...it’s not something that they would easily discuss. Whatever relationship they have is companionable, but there is a measure of a distance between them that can’t be quite breached. But then, Will has never really let anybody breach his distance. Not unless it comes to the point where he has to keep himself open, so he can destroy whoever’s trying.

So instead of extending concern or comfort, Will asks, “I assume you’re calling with news?”

“I am,” Margot says, and Will can hear the shuffle of papers. “My brother’s posted a reward for any information about Dr. Lecter. Another reward for Dr. Du Maurier. I just wanted to let you know, Graham - I can notify you if anything comes up. Mason’s got his fingers in a lot of pies. I’ll know anything before the FBI might tell you.”

He didn’t expect _this_ , either.

“I don’t want to know,” Will says, soft. “But thank you for offering. I appreciate it.”

“You want your vacation,” Margot concludes. He can hear the smile in her voice. “All right. I’ll leave you to your dogs, Graham.”

Will says, “If he's caught. Are you going to testify?”

There is a long pause at the other end of the line. Will almost thinks she has hung up, except he can hear the rasp of her breath.

“I want to,” she says. “But my brother’s going to.”

She hangs up.

She’s realized that Lecter was the one who led Mason to...to do what he did to her. Because of some sick, twisted game. And to tell a court exactly what happened would implicate Mason, who will deny anything, who wants to make Lecter pay for what he’s done. It would interfere in whatever gain Margot could have wrought from him when he’s bedridden and weak like this, whatever revenge she has in store for the future. She can’t testify for that child.

An extinguished reckoning.

Will knows.

He wonders - hopes - that Margot will get what she’s planning to take, even if it may take her years before she acts. It’s still in there, that conclusion: _doing bad things to bad people feels good._ Will Graham has lost a son and a daughter to Hannibal Lecter, though, of course, he doesn’t whether Margot’s child would have been a son or not although that’s what she wanted and still wants. He didn’t know that it would make him feel so vulnerable and furious at the same time.

There’s another realization, too. Mason Verger was nearly killed in Will’s house. In Virginia. Will has a strong feeling - no, he _knows_ \- that Mason wants that charge of attempted murder tried with the murder of the judge. He’s looking at the death penalty.

 

* * *

 

Will Graham is not the sort of person who turns to pencil and paper. His eidetic memory is enough, burning entire conversations in his mind. He can remember the imperceptible changes in the shifts of Hannibal Lecter's expressions; he can remember how it felt when Alana Bloom kissed him; how Jack Crawford pushed up his glasses the first time they met.

But tonight, he leaves the recently-purchased whiskey in the cabinet, and sorts out the memories from the dreams, scrawling shorthand notes on lined paper.

When he’s finished, he’s left with the vague feeling that he should have drank after all.

The next night, he calls Margot Verger and tells her he’s changed his mind.

 

* * *

 

He buys a cheap map of the world from a knickknack store around the corner, a store stocked and crowded with random products: multicolored children’s toys, antique furniture, glossy posters of forgotten celebrities. Will unwinds the map, sticks it up on the bedroom wall, and stares at it with a handful of thumbtacks in hand.

There’s about eighty countries out there that do not have extradition treaties with the United States. But he remembers something that he told Jack Crawford: _Go after his palate._

Hannibal Lecter had sketches of Italy on his desk. His flowers were arranged in _ikebana_ , something connected to his aunt. Dr. Lecter went to medical school in France; Will remembers seeing anatomical textbooks in French, which seemed more worn and older than the English ones. And there’s Lecter’s references to religions. Possibly, sacred Judeo-Christian sites; possibly, Hindu holy places, from the way that he mutilated the corpse that he thought was Freddie Lounds. And the paintings of the walls of his office and his house...

Will tries to make himself remember each dish that Hannibal has served, where the recipes came from. If Hannibal hadn’t explained the origins, Will stops to jot down the contents: the spices, the vegetables, how they were arranged on the plates, and even the type of meat that Hannibal claimed them to have, though he was lying on that count for a long, long time. Will will have to look up the recipes later.

He pushes red thumb tacks against those countries. The majority of them have extradition treaties with the U.S.

When he opens his laptop, Margot Verger has emailed him a list of unconfirmed sightings of Hannibal and Du Maurier, several linking back to news articles. Most of them are ambiguous. Concerned citizens calling about a dark menacing figure that passed by them in the street, opportunistic people looking to cash in for the reward. Some of them seem to be alarmed look-alike sightings. In New York, a woman swore that she saw Du Maurier in a cafe. In California, a man was actually taken into custody, but soon released. In London, a tourist passed by a man, and it wasn’t until after he saw a biopic of a Boston mobster, which included a snapshot of the FBI’s recent Most Wanted List, that he realized whom he had supposedly seen. There’s panicked reports that Hannibal is back in Baltimore, attending the opera. And a fuzzy photograph taken in Japan has been a great cause of speculation, but it’s too blurred to say anything definite. Even Will can’t tell.

The list goes on. The whole world is looking for Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier.

Will finds himself, between hours, poring over the map on his wall. Sticking thumbtacks and counting the countries. Pulling together the leads that Margot gives him and what the press reports. He continues reaching back to his memories.

After a week of gathering information, he takes a picture of the map, organizes the list, and sends them to Jack Crawford.

 _Vacation, Will_? Jack texts him.

 _One more, Jack_ , Will texts in response, because this is what he wants, just this one more. His phone rings, nearly immediately.

“You and Alana Bloom are more alike than you think,” Jack says to him, and he’s repressing laughter, the sound crackling in Will’s ear. “She beat you, though. She sent me a list of places three days ago.”

Jack adds, “She _also_ had information we’ve withheld from the press so far. I don’t know how she and Z know each other, but…” Will can hear him shaking his head. “I’m not going to ask you how you made that map, Will.”

“Well,” Will says, unabashed, “it’s a good reference, Jack. A starting point.”

More soberly, Jack says, “And you’re calling the same reason she is, I assume. You saw the press release.”

It was an official press release about the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force altering their make-up, now focusing more on the major task of fugitive-searching. It isn’t the separate agencies investigating independently, but collectively, pooling their resources together. Besides being a practical move, it’s a political one, especially with the FBI getting blowback for not sharing their suspicions about Hannibal Lecter in the first place.

“I want in,” Will says, simply. The whole world and Will Graham is looking for Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier.

“You’re in,” Jack says. “Like I told Dr. Bloom. Our security concerns have been minimized. We think they’re overseas. Working with the task force is one of the safest places you could be, but you two will still keep your bodyguards.” He sounds guilty, pulling Will into this again, but relieved to have him back. Business as usual.

“The sightings in the States don’t seem genuine,” Will agrees. “They probably left on fake I.D.s, but with all the publicity, it's hard to come back. Airport security is tight.” He walks over to his map, stares at it intensely as if he’s a psychic trying to sense location, vibration.

“You can always stay,” Jack reminds him, a gentle warning. “You can trust us to find him. Alana can keep you updated. He _stabbed_ you, Will.”

“If I stay,” Will says, “I’m still going to continue looking anyway. He stabbed you, and you’re looking. And...he killed Abigail. Beverly. And my - I can’t, Jack.”

He puts his palm against the map, fingers spreading against the thumbtacks. “I feel better,” he says. “Going over my memories, reliving it. Isn’t there a theory about how dreams help organize memories? It’s a similar emotion. Reliving, organizing. They’re not like the nightmares I had earlier. I don’t feel entirely stable, but I don’t feel entirely _un_ stable, either.”

He wants to see Alana again. He wants to feel that certainty that Hannibal Lecter will be caught, working in a room full of investigators, working until he forgets the noise Abigail Hobbs made when Hannibal cut her throat, working until he forgets how Hannibal had held his bloodstained hands and told him how good killing feels.

“All right,” Jack says. “Don’t forget - there’s always people you can see if you need to. The task force has its own critical incident counselors. They’re good people, Will.”

Will wants to laugh. Another therapist. He wants to say that he’s had enough of therapists to last a lifetime (with Alana being the exception). But he doesn’t, he only thanks Jack. After he hangs up, he starts to pack. He takes the map down from the wall, closes his laptop, and sleeps on that dusty bed for the last time.

He leaves Philadelphia in the morning.

When he arrives home in Wolf Trap, he tumbles into bed - his dogs will be brought over tomorrow - and sleeps soundly. It’s the right kind of dream, this time, pieces of things. The feel of Abigail Hobbs' hand across the backdrop of a window streaming light. The slow rise of _hope_ he had felt when he had looked down at Margot Verger’s stomach. The humor in Jack’s voice when he had talked about Alana.

 

 

* * *

 

The base of the task force’s operations isn’t Quantico, but in Baltimore, a blend of local and state and federal agencies collaborating together. Will can passingly recognize most of the faces, from the news and from working together with them in the past, but the notable newcomers are the U.S. Marshals, representatives from their own Capital Area Regional Task Force. He’s craning his head, looking to spot Alana, but he’s interrupted by a man dressed in a black suit, his dark hair flecked with white.

“Will Graham,” the man says, proffering his hand. “You’re a hard man to find. Welcome back.”

“Sorry, who--?” Will starts to say, not returning the offered handshake, still wondering where Alana is.

“Ettore De Angelis,” the man says. “I’m from the State Attorney’s office. I’ll be prosecuting Dr. Lecter.” He adds, with an enigmatic smile, “Matthew Brown says hello. He’s looking forward to seeing you again.”

His orderly.

“Is that a threat, Mr. De Angelis?” Will says, and it’s a genuine question.

“Hell if I know,” De Angelis replies. “He’s a creepy kid, isn’t he?”

De Angelis waves him over to a small, unoccupied office - presumably, his own - and Will sits down in a nearby chair. De Angelis’ desk is covered with piles and piles of papers, folders and manila envelopes and newspaper clippings organized in neat stacks. He’s taped the fragment of a poem to his computer monitor, a poem inspired by Salvador Dali’s painting ‘Autumn Cannibalism’: _In the distance, the white mission weeps under the weight of the impending torrent. Even the mercy of mountains can’t protect from the ruin of man._

Will waits for De Angelis to speak. He decides that he likes De Angelis. There’s something forward about him that reminds him of Jack. He seems sharp, capable.

“First things first,” De Angelis says, “you’ve been granted total immunity, Mr. Graham. For whatever you’ve done undercover, especially - there’s a precedent for that, of course. Lecter’s future defense will most likely argue how you were unauthorized by the proper authorities, but when it comes down to it, you were cleared by the agent-in-charge, Jack Crawford. Essentially, you’ve both been given immunity. We need your testimonies to convict a man who is probably the most notorious serial killer in the twenty-first century by now, and we don’t need you to perjure yourselves.”

He continues, “The feds are letting us go first, on account of us having the bulk of physical evidence and witnesses. Lecter never took any organs from the FBI agents at Dr. Chilton’s house, so there’s no physical evidence in his basement; there’s Beverly Katz, but it seems as if he’s already...consumed her missing kidney, cleaned whatever tools he used for her body. They’re also hoping that Miriam Lass can salvage any definite memories, in time, as she’s still in therapy. We’re up to bat, Mr. Graham, and we’re looking for a grand jury indictment sometime soon.”

Grand jury. Which is why De Angelis needs witnesses, needs Will.

“And the other prosecutors?” Will asks, recalling his conversation with Margot Verger. “Minnesota? Virginia?”

“After the U.S. attorney’s office, if they’re so inclined,” De Angelis answers. “They might not. Lecter may already be piled with enough life sentences that it doesn’t make a difference. Too expensive for them.”

“Virginia has the death penalty,” Will says.

“Sure,” De Angelis says. “So do the feds. They don’t take kindly to the murder of their own, but like I said, they don’t have the best of physical evidence. Do you want him to die, Mr. Graham? It won’t happen in this state, but it could.”

“I don’t know,” Will says. He remembers that old daydream of his, being strapped to the electric chair and pulling the switch. He tries to imagine Hannibal in his place. He doesn’t feel satisfied about the thought, but he doesn’t feel heartbroken about it, either. It’s hard to picture Hannibal wearing a prison jumpsuit, shaking and sweating on that chair, every piece inside him getting shocked and shocked until his heart stops, his breathing stops. Hannibal would want to die elegantly, fighting, his body painted over with blood.

De Angelis gives him a nod. It doesn’t seem as if he’s judging him, and it doesn’t seem as if he pities him, either. Will realizes that De Angelis has been submerged in every single gory detail of the Chesapeake Ripper case. In a way, he’s seen more than Will. Will hasn’t seen the crime scene photographs of Hannibal’s basement. Will hasn’t seen the infamous rolodex stocked with recipe cards and business cards, which seems more of a rumor than truth. Will hasn’t had to piece the entire story together from the middle, interviewing and canvassing, making sense of a man he hasn’t even met. De Angelis knows this monster for his monstrous things: it didn’t begin with an official introduction, or a shared meal, or saving the life of a dying girl. For Ettore De Angelis, it began with corpses. It began with working besides the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force as the bodies accumulated, concentrating on the patterns, trying to determine what evidence may be inadmissible or not in court, talking to victims’ family members and friends.

“I need to know everything that’s happened, everything that led up to that near-massacre in Lecter’s house,” De Angelis says. “I know the essential facts, but you know more than that. How did you meet Dr. Lecter, Mr. Graham?”

De Angelis takes a recorder out from his pocket, puts it on his desk.

Will takes a breath. It starts with the Minnesota Shrike. No, it starts in a classroom Quantico, Virginia, the F.B.I. academy. It starts with the swing of his pendulum and the sound of gunfire. _I shoot Mr. Marlow twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. He will die watching me take what is his away from him. This is my design._

He recalls the notes that he had scribbled down in Philadelphia, and follows the thread of them.

 

* * *

 

He’s in De Angelis’ office for three hours, but he doesn’t realize it until De Angelis puts a hand on his shoulder, breaks him out of his trance. The sun is setting in the window, casting orange light, and the building seems quieter. Many of the officers have probably left for home already.

“That’s enough,” De Angelis says, gently. He reaches over to turn off the recorder. De Angelis is wearing a pair of glasses - he must have put them on when Will was talking, he didn’t notice them - and his green eyes are peering at Will keenly through them. There’s a yellow legal pad covered in an illegible scrawl on his lap.

He says, “You can come back tomorrow. You did well, Mr. Graham.”

Will blinks back to the present, wipes the back of his hand across his forehead. “Mr. De Angelis,” he says. He exhales a steadying breath, and then makes eye contact with the prosecutor. “Thank you.”

He will have his reckoning after all, but he won’t have it alone. _Even the mercy of mountains can’t protect them._ The whole world is looking for Hannibal Lecter, and he will be chased and be held responsible for everything that he’s done. This is not a vengeance of cutting his throat while he hangs, but something different.

“Just doing my job,” De Angelis says, with a smile pulling at his mouth. “I’ll get you covered. I’ve already heard from Dr. Bloom.” And at the mention of her name, he looks to the doorway, and she’s there - Alana Bloom, the sunlight passing over her face. It looks as if she’s been in the building the whole day, her appearance slightly ruffled, the side of her right palm inky black.

“Will,” Alana says. “There you are. Jack said that you’ll be here, but I haven’t seen you around.” She nods a greeting to De Angelis. “But I see that Ettore’s been keeping you.”

“Alana,” Will says. He stands up from his chair, halfway starts toward her. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says back at him. “How was protective custody, Will? Jack told me that I beat you. Got a list in before you.”

“I got a map, too,” Will says.

She gives him a smile, fond and warm and exasperated. “I was in New Jersey. Where were you?”

“Philadelphia,” Will says. He hadn’t called her from there yet, busy settling in, busy trying to compile his list and his map. Their conversation right now is stiff, stilted. Will wants to tell her he’s missed her, but doesn’t know if he should.

“I’ve lectured in Pennsylvania before,” she says, gracefully. Then she glances over at De Angelis, says, “Sorry about that. We’re catching up,” and gestures Will to follow her out of his office. Will trails behind her, listens as she bids task force members goodbye.

“You’ll have to be briefed tomorrow,” Alana says, as she continues walking. “We’re not sure if we’re close to anything solid, but I think we’re making good progress, considering all the leads we’re getting. Our lists were helpful. Helped narrow down some things.”

“Where are you going?” Will asks, when he sees that they’re heading to leave the building. She waves over two FBI agents - a blonde woman, a heavily built man - who Will assumes are her bodyguards. Will’s guards, who had stopped to talk with FBI agents on the task force, move over to join them.

“You don’t have a place in town, do you?” Alana says. “I’m staying in a nearby hotel; it’s also near the bureau field office here. Jack said he wanted to keep us in the same place, so there’s a room for you.”

“I was hoping that I could go back home to the dogs, actually,” Will says, an apology in his voice. “They’re being brought back to Wolf Trap now. I wanted to check up on them.”

“Then can I come with you?” Alana asks. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for awhile. Face-to-face, not on the phone. And I’ve missed playing with your dogs,” she adds. “Applesauce has been missing their company. I wish I could bring her over now.”

“Of course,” Will says. He’s surprised at her request, but doesn’t even think of refusing. “Maybe Applesauce can come over next time.”

 

* * *

 

The dogs are happy to see Alana again, and they’re happy to be home, too. They run along the fields in front of Will’s house, yipping with excitement. Rocky gives Alana a lick on her ink stained hand in greeting, while Winston holds out his paw to shake.

“I didn’t realize how comforting dogs would be,” she tells him, as they’re standing on the porch together, watching the dogs, “but they help. Having Applesauce in Newark with me probably saved my sanity.”

“Man and woman’s best friend,” Will agrees. And he tells her about that night when he’d slept with the dogs on the porch under the full moon, when their howls sounded like a lullaby. It’s a strange thing, he knows, but she seems to understand.

“But I feel better now,” he says. “Like I’m doing something productive. Drawing up lists, talking to De Angelis.”

“I’ve noticed,” she says. “Busywork. It’s always something you do, when you’re frustrated.”

“Are you psychoanalyzing me, Dr. Bloom?”

“No,” she says with a huff. “It’s something I do, too.” She shakes her head and keeps her eyes on the dogs. Yes, Will knows. He wonders how many hours she’s put into her own lists, cooperating with the task force. She’s not the type of person who will go down in history as ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’s girlfriend’, because that’s not who she is. She’s a consultant on the task force that will catch him. She’s the woman who concealed a gun, just in case she needed it, and she eventually did.

She says, sudden, “Do you--do you ever miss him, Will?”

“Do I ever miss Hannibal Lecter?” Will repeats. He sighs, looks up at the night sky, where you can see the dim lights of stars.

“What a question, right?” Alana says, jostling him lightly with her arm. “Sometimes I do, though. It’s - frightening. I went out to eat one night, and thought, without really thinking at all, _This pasta isn’t as good as Hannibal’s_. God knows what he really put in his pastas, but...I still thought it. It’s stupid of me. It’s little things like that keep cropping up in my head. I know exactly what he is, but I can’t help it. Stupid.”

“No,” Will says. “I miss him, too.”

It’s something he doesn’t honestly want to admit to himself, but he says it now.

“I tried to use him, to make him reveal himself,” Will says, quietly. “I pretended to be like him, Alana, and he wanted to run with me. He wanted to. That’s why - my list’s a little bit longer than yours. He told me about Paris and Florence and London. He called me his Patroclus. I skimmed over _The Iliad_ because of him, if you can believe that. But he gutted me anyway. And Abigail, right in front of me.”

“God,” she says. “He played all of us like his goddamned _theremin_ , didn’t he?”

“He did,” Will says, “but he also thought he loved us.”

Alana reaches for Will’s hand, and squeezes it. “Some love,” she says. “Ettore says that he might get the death penalty. He hasn’t been caught yet, but I know he will, and I can’t stop thinking about it. But - I don’t know _exactly_ what to think about that. It feels - messed up, Will, not knowing how to feel. Whether I should morally, righteously declare that he doesn’t deserve death, it’s inhumane. Whether I should think that _is_ what he deserves. For everything that he’s taken.”

“When you're on the task force,” Alana murmurs, “you make frequent contact with the victims’ parents, with siblings, with friends. There’s so many who are in town now because of us. You have to keep them updated on your progress, if you find any leads that seem worth it. Notify them when there’s going to be an upcoming press release. Have you ever met Beverly Katz’s parents, Will? Or Judge Davies’ wife and son and grandchildren? Did you know Miriam Lass’ roommate joined the task force right after she graduated from the academy?”

Will shakes his head. Alana’s hand is warm, fingers curled into his.

“Yeah,” she says. “You’re not a people person, Will, even with what you’ve got in that head of yours. I just - it’s been hard. Being here. Busywork. But it helps.”

“And I’m glad you’re back, even if it took a little longer than me,” she says, with a small smile.

The dogs race across the fields. Will watches them, and keeps holding Alana’s hand. When he lets go, she gives him that small smile again. Will lets her bravery steady him, surround him, like borrowed wings.

 

* * *

 

After hearing from De Angelis’ witnesses, the grand jury brings back a true bill.

They’ve indicted Dr. Hannibal Lecter on twenty-eight counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder, and one count - Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier - for harboring a fugitive.

 


	4. Chapter 4

It turns out that Matthew doesn’t need to stand trial for the attempted murder of Hannibal Lecter after all. It gets dropped, partly due to Lecter’s absence, and partly, Matthew speculates, an unwillingness on Jack Crawford’s part to testify. Which leaves Andy Sykes’ death, a charge that Matthew’s lawyer assures him will easily go away.

Ettore De Angelis visits him with news of Lecter and Du Maurier’s indictments. Matthew wasn’t needed to testify in front of the grand jury, but it looks like Will Graham and the others did their parts.

“We’ve given Graham immunity,” De Angelis says, settling across Matthew in the privacy room. “If you were ever worried about your testimony implicating him of murder by proxy.”

“I see,” Matthew says.

Matthew had a feeling that was going to happen. He hadn’t lied in his recorded testimony to De Angelis, although he was prepared to. _Love always protects._ But he knew that Graham wouldn’t lie. Their statements had to line up for them to matter.

De Angelis looks tired. There’s dark circles underneath his eyes; his black suit is wrinkled. Matthew imagines that Graham’s given De Angelis quite the tale. A tale that he has to run around to see if he can find anyone else to collaborate it, a tale full of complicated chapters. Dr. Lecter is a tricky customer indeed.

“Mr. De Angelis,” Matthew asks, thoughtfully, “have you ever done this before? Been part of a circus like this?”

De Angelis raises his eyebrows. “I’m sure the judge and other attorneys would disagree on you labeling this case a circus, Mr. Brown. It’s a high-profile case, if that’s what you mean. Why do you ask?”

Matthew shrugs. “It has the makings of a legend, doesn’t it? The way the world’s jumped onto it: there’s a villain who captured public imagination, on the run with a beautiful woman. A hero who’s not exactly a hero, because there’s something missing in him. The people that are left behind, hurt in a thousand and one ways. And you’re a part of this, and so am I.”

He says, “The world hasn’t realized how much this is Will Graham’s legend. They think this is Hannibal Lecter’s legend. A polite, charming, wealthy psychopathic cannibal who’s smarter than everyone else. But this is not about him. This is not a story that will confirm what he is, exalt him and his kind, the kind of monsters that believe they are God. I’m here to watch because this is Will Graham’s legend. He’s reclaiming what I couldn’t take for him.”

“And you,” De Angelis says, “don’t believe you’re God?”

Matthew grins. De Angelis knows he’s a killer; this is his field of work, his specialty. He was listening, and he knew, when Matthew regaled him about hanging Dr. Lecter with bright eyes. “I want to emulate God and every form he takes on earth. It's what I do, Mr. De Angelis. Isn’t that what the Lord aspires us to become?”

 _Become_ is Francis’ word. The Dragon’s word. Matthew doesn’t realize it until after he’s said it, realizes that his last sentence is tinged with a nearly unnoticeable lisp. His hand tightens, rattles the chain on his wrist.

De Angelis studies him carefully. “Mr. Brown, your perversion of faith is…unorthodox. I hope that you’ll refrain saying so in court, if you think that Graham is a manifestation of something holy.”

He continues, “As for me, I follow God in his call to seek justice. To learn to do right. To defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

“You represent the dead,” Matthew says, recovering himself, slipping into the eloquence and grandiosity once again. “The victims. You speak for them, in front of a jury, laying out wrongs to be righted. Mr. Graham and I speak for the monsters. It’s in our bones, in our blood, in our membranes, in the very core and heart of us. One day, I might be the center of my very own legend.” He’s only been an outlier on the edge of legends, his only participation being his mimicry.

There is a flicker of a wry smile on De Angelis’ face. “You just might, Mr. Brown. And I hope that I won’t be that prosecutor across the table from you. You’re one creepy kid.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Matthew says. “You’re more honest than a priest I confessed to recently. He was unsettled.”

“No details, Mr. Brown,” De Angelis says, with another dry look. “I recognize the seal of confession as another form of attorney-client privilege. Although I hardly see the point of confession if you’ve turned it into a boast, which I expect you’re implying.”

It wasn’t a boast. Not exactly. Matthew doesn’t argue, however, and instead muses, “Hmm. Have you ever confessed to a priest about your successful convictions? Do you ever feel guilty for however long you’ve sentenced them? Do you ever feel guilty for giving them death - I know you must have, before the death penalty was repealed here. Do their children cry in court because of you, the defender of the fatherless, making these children fatherless? Do their wives sob like the daughters of Jerusalem that wept over Jesus? I suppose you may have had occasional doubts that you’ve gone after the innocent.”

He enjoys this. Trying to provoke De Angelis, even if the attorney doesn’t ever seem to react with bad temper. It didn’t work when he brought up interagency rivalries, and it doesn’t precisely work now.

“Hannibal Lecter is far from innocent in this case. You know that as well as I do. It’s preposterous trying to attribute guilt to me,” De Angelis says. “The only guilt here is that we weren’t fast enough to catch the bastard. The only guilt is, as you said, for the victims that couldn’t be saved, and those that grieve for them.”

He picks up his folder. He stands to leave, fixing Matthew with a solemn expression, a glare of the overhead light on the half-moon of his glasses. “There can be a thin line in law and crime. The blanket immunity given to Graham is proof enough of that. He sent you to kill someone, Mr. Brown, and he _did_ kill someone, in fact, setting the corpse on display in a museum like it was their new Tyrannosaurus rex. That man he killed was certainly a deranged man, another manipulated patient of Lecter’s, a serial killer. But I’ve looked over his record and he was someone who belonged permanently in a mental facility. He wasn’t on Lecter’s level. He wasn’t reprehensibly psychopathic, a category that misses legal insanity by a long shot. Randall Tier could have been ruled legally insane. He’d be strapped down to his cot to the nines; he’d be a high biting risk; he would be in a mental hospital for the rest of his days.

“Graham had no right to take his life, even if the argument of justifiable homicide is on the table. That’s very hard to prove, and after all, it was his unwillingness to fire a gun as a police officer that cost him his job in the first place. He’s had training in shooting to incapacitate. The authority of a defendant’s fate lies at the hands of the court. Will Graham had no authority to determine whether Tier should live or die, and string him up like he did. But that’s all forgiven. You can say I’m a de facto priest in that light. And this forgiveness will, I believe, successfully secure us with Dr. Lecter’s conviction.”

With a hand on the door, De Angelis says, “And for any other cases, Mr. Brown, that’s all on my conscience and mine alone. I assure you that my soul is more at rest than yours.” And the glass door closes behind him.

Matthew lets out a whistle into the space that De Angelis has left behind. He thinks that this might be the first time De Angelis is voicing his objections against Will Graham out loud. Despite all of De Angelis’ habitual nonchalance and good nature, he vigorously cares about having Lecter get his just desserts.

It’s very funny and nearly touching. It’s also a very good thing that he’s on Ettore De Angelis’ side, right now, too. He wouldn’t want to be across the table from him in court, either.

 

* * *

 

He remembers--his mother.

He’s memorized her, the russet red of her hair and the freckles on her arms, her shoulders, her cheeks. She worked at the local union as an office assistant and sat at the help desk at the harbor. Sometimes she tells Matthew that his father was a union man, an organizer, a leader, but he passed away. Sometimes she tells Matthew that his father was a strong man who worked in construction at the port, but he died in a terrible accident. She tells Matthew to always pray for him.

They’re good lies, but the rest of the neighborhood knows, and so Matthew knows, that his old man used to run with the local mob. Matthew remembers, distantly, that his father had the same color of eyes that he has. The same color hair. He thinks that his father spoke softly, a quiet tone that carried.

His father tried to rob a bank with a bunch of other guys, and that’s how he died. Shot dead by a security guard.

But his mother never talks about it to him. She reads him Bible verses at his bedside: from the beginning of the Earth to Adam and Eve to the first murder with Cain and Abel and on. She isn’t afraid of reading to him stories of death, and war, and destruction, and persecution. She finds out that he has a knack for memorization, and gives him each and every prayer she knows: the hymns, the rosary, the litanies.

But she dies when he’s sixteen, and he’s on his own.

In his independence, he finds out that he’s a chameleon. He can alter how he speaks if he listens carefully to other people’s speech patterns. He can change how he walks, putting a slouch in his shoulder, putting a limp in his foot, and it looks natural, and sometimes he forgets he’s doing it until he reminds himself not to. It’s strange, and Matthew is scared how easy it is to _disappear_ , to blend in, so he strikes, attacks, embraces the madness. He’s always known that there was something missing in him, and he thought it was because of his father at first, but it’s something deeper. His mother’s prayers pass from his lips and fill him with nothing.

He sets fires, and he swipes cars, and he carries a knife in his pocket at all times. There’s jail, and then there’s the hospital, and then there’s Francis Dolarhyde.

This is when he realizes that he needs someone and something to ground himself. This is when he realizes that he needs a fixation, a focus, before he goes spinning off the rails. Blending isn’t so scary any more because he knows there will be a time when he’ll eventually emerge, but only after he puts himself together. He needs to _focus_ , and he does. He finds that there is a kind of people out there that he can relate to and fit into, delving into bloody and gruesome interests.

(Andy Sykes was never taken aback by Matthew’s interest in murders and court cases. But he didn’t want to be Andrew Sykes’ friend.)

Francis Dolarhyde is composed of certain fractions of moments: a family to be broken apart, a full moon to kill under, a mirror to shatter, a painting of a red dragon. Matthew starts altering himself to be a composition of Francis Dolarhyde: lisp, tattoos, and strength in his own arms. _Focus. Focus._

Francis shows him how to shoot a gun - the grip techniques, how to load it, how to aim. He doesn’t necessarily trust Matthew, but he likes the attention. He helps Matthew break out of the hospital, and they go to the museum, and Matthew looks at the paintings and sees them through Francis’ eyes and realizes how much more life makes sense if he just...does it. If he emulates, imitates, mimics. If he _Becomes_ , and hears Francis’ Dragon roaring at him, always and always angry.

He remembers closing his eyes and lying back, and Francis is tracing his fingers on Matthew’s stomach and planning out the shape and the whorls of his tattoos. Francis is reciting Revelations under his breath - _When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman he had given birth to the male child. The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle_ \- and that’s what the ink takes form into, something almost like wings, something almost like a curled pattern of a feather. Matthew attaches onto birds, and the metaphor they can provide, especially when it comes to wanting freedom after being caged.

But he does not have a true partnership with Francis Dolarhyde.

The rituals of a murderer is his and his alone. He needs them, and repeats them, and wants to find out what exact fantasy he needs to reenact, over and over again. Francis Dolarhyde doesn’t need Matthew Brown for the rituals.

Matthew never does see the real painting in D.C. that Francis covets. Francis chases after his prey on his own. Matthew wanders, and ends up in Baltimore, and reads a news article one day.

“The Marlowes,” he murmurs to himself, now. “That was their name.”

 

* * *

 

He has another visitor at the end of the week. It’s Freddie Lounds herself, her heels click-clacking on the floor when Matthew is escorted into the privacy room. She has a notepad at the ready. This might be...entertaining.

“Looks like they let you out of your cage, Miss Lounds,” Matthew says, applying a slip of a lisp in the greeting.

“Looks like they put you into one,” Lounds returns. “It’s nice to see you again, Matthew Brown. I finally have the opportunity to properly acquaint myself with Will Graham’s admirer.”

In a casual tone, Matthew says, “I have a pending trial, Miss Lounds. No comment.”

His part in Hannibal Lecter’s legend hasn’t broke out to the general public yet. Not the sensational tale of Lecter being accosted by someone who knew who he was, who was on Will Graham’s side before anyone else. Freddie Lounds wants to tell it first, apparently.

“Brown, you must have something to say,” Lounds says. She leans close across the table - dangerously close, in Matthew’s estimation - and casts him a calculating expression. “If you’re his admirer, that means you’ve been reading my articles. You know what it’s like to be a fan. There’s demand, especially if a captivating character like Hannibal Lecter is involved.”

Matthew starts to laugh, softly, and finally decides to drops the lisp. As if he’s being conspiratorial, he leans forward himself toward Lounds, and whispers, “I’d back away, Miss Lounds. If I’m the copycat of the copycat, it would be helpful to know that I knew someone in my past who could bite.” He shows his own teeth, a brief flash of white, and hears the lisp tinge the word _past._

He continues, “And you’re unbelievable. I take it that your life being threatened by Hannibal Lecter hasn’t affected you at all.”

“Oh, it has,” Lounds says, but she draws back. “I’m more determined to find out everything that happened with Hannibal Lecter, with the FBI, with everyone else. It smells, Brown. It smells _bad._ You’re...clearly insane, but I’ve been asking around, and it looks like you’re going to walk. While I don’t exactly object to you getting scot-free from trying to kill that cannibalistic psycho, I’ve been digging around, and I’ve found that Andrew Sykes was a friend of yours. Someone whose shifts at the courthouse coincided with you dragging in patients. Please try to tell me that was a coincidence.”

Unfazed, Matthew says, “Is that supposed to help you score an interview with me? It’s not going to work. But you can figure it out yourself, if you’re as determined as you believe yourself to be. Think, Freddie. Think. Why would there be little consequences for me?”

The realization hits Lounds’ face. “You’ll be _testifying._ ”

“Bingo,” Matthew says. “It’s not a conspiracy, Lounds, but I can say that I’m fairly certain there was and is pressure in the state attorney’s office to make sure my record doesn’t get a little more tainted. Just take a look around. Will Graham and Jack Crawford have been granted immunity.”

 _And for any other cases, Mr. Brown, that’s all on my conscience and mine alone_ , De Angelis had said.

“You can go ahead and post that article revealing my relationship with Andy all you like,” Matthew says, with a shrug. “It might come out in court without your help. It might not. But I think, Miss Lounds, that you want to see that bastard go down as much as I do, and that means giving me a neat little interview right now where I’m cast as a hero. If you won’t, there’s always other reporters.”

Lounds is staring at him. She narrows her eyes and says, “Oh, you’re _good_ , Brown. Still goddamned crazy, no matter how ‘careful’ Graham calls you. But you’re good.”

Matthew smiles. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Lounds. I’m still a fan. I appreciate your dedication and your candor. I learned about Mr. Graham through you and won’t ever forget that. But I need you to back away from this one and do what you do best. _Tear him down with your words._ Even if that means raising me up. You know that this media frenzy is likely the key for him being found and convicted.”

This is how he is a chameleon: he speaks her language back at her. He reminds her who she is and what she wants, and Matthew’s life is a little easier because of it.

Lounds’ mouth forms a jagged smile. She’s accepting this as a challenge. She’s as tough as Matthew thought. “Brown, the day will come when I’ll smear your name across headlines for being the loony that you are. But that won’t be today, because I’m going to whip up the biggest media frenzy against Lecter before the court can say ‘jury sequestration.’”

And so they talk.

Matthew doesn’t disclose the bulk of the story. He knows that De Angelis and his lawyer wouldn’t be pleased if he did. Instead, he lets himself talk about being Will Graham’s orderly. Graham’s been a constant topic on the news lately - articles reporting that he’s now on the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force, articles about the charges being filed against Lecter and Du Maurier by the grand jury, articles trying to profile him and contemplate his relationship with Lecter - so he knows it’s not an unwelcome topic.

He finds himself describing Graham’s process: watching him out of the corner of his eyes through the glass of the privacy room as Graham closes his eyes, moves his fingers across photographs. He speaks of Lecter visiting Graham, of the tension that crackled in the way they traded gazes.

And, almost like a reciprocation: “TattleCrime and other news outlets have called Mr. Graham crazy, at times. I would like to say he isn’t. He has a gift, that’s all. I know that he doesn’t necessarily think that it is-”

 _Francis’ Dragon in Matthew’s mind like a parasite that won’t leave, makes him restless on nights of a full moon_.

“--but he can use it, and it defines him.”

 

* * *

 

He knows that he might be projecting on Will Graham. Ever since he read the TattleCrime articles about a copycat killer, dizzy with elation and his breath caught in his throat with anticipation, he wants and needs them to be the same.

Gently, he tries to push Will Graham out of his head. Stripping himself bare, if only for a moment, of his singular object of focus for what’s felt like endless days. He is polite to the shadow of Graham, asking for permission, and it drifts away. Will Graham doesn’t really belong to him, only to himself.

But he’s still left with Francis Dolarhyde, a presence as indelible as his tattoos. Francis’ Dragon has nothing to offer except castigation and promises of hellfire. Matthew doesn’t know this dragon’s origins, but he can feel its breath like a furnace and its wings like a razorblade.

He doesn’t ask Francis’ Dragon anything.

He recites, in a hushed whisper, his voice clear of the lisp, “But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, time and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach.”

This is his banishment. He imagines the black tattoos on his stomach and his back ebbing away. He imagines his bullet wound spanning to blot it all out, red scar tissue like a cobweb. He stretches his arms like he did before Hannibal Lecter, and tries to remember what Matthew Brown is composed of: prayers and grandiosity and obsession. His own accent, his own passion of fire that goes beyond Francis’. Francis thinks little of newspaper reporters and calls them bad critics, but Matthew can find merit in articles, find trails to follow. Francis is enamored with William Blake, and used to mutter fragments of poems into the shell of Matthew’s ear. Matthew never reads poetry, no matter how bored he became in jail and in the psychiatric ward.

But Francis is oppressive, all-consuming. The desire to kill inside of him is what Matthew attaches onto, and it grows, and everything creeps in, the pieces that compose Francis Dolarhyde.

_Focus. Focus._

Matthew’s arms crash back down at his side, and he’s left with the next verse which says nothing of eagle’s wings: _Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent._

This is drowning. The ink recedes back to its former place.

He’s fine. He’s fine. He can keep dancing circles around any guests he receives, and he can keep getting himself submerged in these bloody legends, because it’s a game, the only game he’s got. After all, he knows he can play it well.

 

* * *

 

Due to the lack of evidence and sufficient reasonable doubt, Matthew Brown is acquitted of the charge of the first degree murder of Andrew Sykes. After a final therapy session to evaluate his mental state, he’s to be released from the custody of Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane tomorrow.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Will finds a larger and better map for himself in the task force’s building. Instead of thumbtacks, he uses color-coded post-its, which have the specific details of every purported sighting or from every memory. He’s updated it with recent reports and Alana’s notes.

The phones in the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force’s headquarters are constantly ringing. There’s a torrent of people coming in, coming out, mingling and discussing. Freddie Lounds tries to sneak in that afternoon, only to be unceremoniously ejected when recognized. _Wait for the next press conference, Ms. Lounds,_ a police officer remarks.

To find a semblance of quiet, Will withdraws into a vacant office - which may have been a supply closet, once upon a time, considering how cramped it is - and sits down on the ground with the map spread on the floor. He discards his jacket at his feet. He makes himself think, to reread the notes on the map through the lenses of his glasses, rubbing a hand across his forehead. But he feels his mind wandering.

Dr. Lecter’s house. He should come back to it; he knows he should. Alana has been visiting it, trying to see if she can recover anything that investigators couldn’t find, or to attempt to catch if there’s anything missing that can be used to identify Hannibal. Any possessions, clothing. Any little detail to be added onto Wanted posters. She’s at Lecter’s house today with Jack now. Will had declined to accompany them.

The recurring symmetry of it - Will Graham, Jack Crawford, and Alana Bloom at Dr. Lecter’s house - is more than slightly uncomfortable. So Will stays, and contents himself with photographs and his memory, but his gut tells him that he’ll be coming back to it eventually.

He’s jolted from his thoughts when there’s a knock at the door. Other members of the task force? Or his FBI shadows checking up on him? Or maybe Alana and Jack are back?

“Come in,” he calls toward the doorway.

It’s a young police officer, of the Maryland State Police according to his uniform. He says, halting, “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Graham, but I saw you go in here. I’m Officer Tom--Thomas Stewart. I have some of the recent reports that came in, if you’d like to see them.”

Will guesses that the officer must have volunteered to do it. He’s no ordinary secretary or courier. Will has been featured in newspapers lately, a newfound celebrity, so he has a feeling that’s the officer’s reason. But then he recognizes the name.

“Stewart?” Will asks. He remembers his briefing, and remembers reading the files. “You found Hannibal Lecter’s basement.”

“Yes, sir, that was me,” Stewart says, nodding. “I was with the first wave that responded to Dr. Bloom’s call, saw you and her and Agent Crawford being loaded into ambulances. It looked like a real bloodbath. It’s good to see you on your feet, Mr. Graham.”

Will nods, stiffly, and accepts the file of papers that Stewart’s holding. “Thank you.”

Hesitantly, Stewart continues, “It was the stuff of nightmares. I’ve been on the force for two years and have never seen anything like that. The basement, I mean, sir.”

With a sardonic smile, Will says, “I don’t think anybody’s seem someone like Hannibal Lecter before, Officer Stewart.”

“Well, you saw him coming, Mr. Graham, before anyone else did, if you don’t mind me saying so,” Stewart says. “I don’t care what everyone else has been saying about the Fibbies. The FBI,” Stewart flushes at the slip, “but you did the best you could. Especially with a murderer like that.”

Will’s silent for a second, considering what to tell the officer. He’s never expected anything akin to admiration or respect, and instead he sighs, shrugs his shoulders. “We could’ve done more. We always could have. I was ‘undercover’ for a long time, but he bolted before we could catch him. He’s still out there, and because of what he is, he might still be killing. Still be constructing rooms like that basement you found.”

Stewart grimaces. “Hopefully, we’ll catch him soon, sir. I didn’t go up to the grand jury - the prosecutor’s got a lot of witnesses under his belt apparently, and I’m not one of the expert forensic investigators - but I’m up at the trial. Maybe that will clear my head of that damned room, do you think?”

Will has recently been given the pictures. An industry-sized freezer, a large concrete slab stained slightly red, and meat left hanging to dry. Meat in the shape of torso and limb. There are signs of someone having hidden down there, among the stone and blood. It was Abigail Hobbs.

“That’s up to you,” Will says, quietly. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’ve been told that there are counselors here, if you’d like to see them.” The offering sounds clumsy, rusty, but he means it.

“I don’t want an apology or anything. It’s part of my job, sir,” Stewart says. “I just..I wanted to meet you. See Will Graham for myself, when he’s not on a stretcher.”

“And what do you think? Not as impressive as you expected?”

“No, sir,” Stewart says. “You’re staying. That’s more than I can say for myself.” He backs away toward the door, tips his cap toward Will. “After this case is done, and I testify, my brother has a motel business, and I’m going to help him run it. No cannibals in that line of work. Maybe Norman Bates, but at least he was no cannibal.”

Will laughs. He says, “Who’s to say I’m not going to run away myself when this case is done?” _One more_ , he had texted Jack. One more.

Stewart smiles, and says, “Then that’s up to you. It was an honor meeting you, sir.” He exits the room.

Will catches himself smiling down at his map. He remembers what it was like, even if it’s a distant memory. A young police officer on the force who didn’t want to do it any more. The force of Will’s imagination was too much to control, out in the line of fire, with a gun at his belt. He lets out a breath, and realizes that there’s a perspective he needs. A specific frame of mind. It’s an option that Officer Stewart’s deference reminded him of - no, not yet.

First, he needs to go to Dr. Lecter’s house.

His work with his map is little more than procrastination, even though it has collected his thoughts. He picks up his jacket, leaves papers strewn across the floor, and searches for his FBI shadows. They’re talking to another FBI agent - a young woman with curly hair drawn into a ponytail - and she waves them away when she hears Will’s request. “I can take him. It’s okay. Agent Crawford, Dr. Bloom, and her bodyguards are already there. We’ll be back soon.”

“Special Agent Ardelia Mapp,” the agent introduces herself. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Miriam Lass. It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Graham.”

Miriam Lass’ former roommate, Will thinks, recalling Alana’s mention. He nods a greeting and accompanies Mapp into a standard government-issued car, taking the passenger’s seat. Mapp catches his eye in the rearview mirror.

She says, “She’s doing better, Mr. Graham. She’s not back in class yet, but she’s recovering. Slowly starting to remember some things.”

_Neither of us are really free._

“That’s good to hear,” Will says, his voice hoarse, and looks out the window. The window is tinted, and Will watches the blurred forms of cars rush by. He doesn’t think of the pictures of Frederick Chilton’s head splattered with blood. He doesn’t think of how it reminds him of Randall Tier’s broken and battered form.

Mapp notices the expression on his face. She says, “I don’t think you recognize me, but I’ve sat down on a lecture of yours once. You’re...perceptive, when it comes to these serial killers. I remember thinking: If only you’d been there to get the Chesapeake Ripper. Before Mia - Miriam - tried to get to him. But it looks like you’re here now. You should’ve seen how her face lit up when I told her you joined the task force. So thanks.”

Will sees one of her hands clench tight across the steering wheel. Mapp says, an abrupt malice in her voice, “ _Two years_ , Mr. Graham. He had her for two years.”

“Long time to have him in your head,” Will murmurs, the same thing he had told Jack.

“It is,” Mapp says. She looks at the road in front of her and says, “Mia was thinking of me when he had her. She told me that he told her not to worry about me. That she could send me a note and a ring as a reassurance. She told me it was a beautiful little ring. Silver, set with emeralds. It had both of our initials carved on the inside.”

Mapp lets out a laugh.

“I didn’t get any note or ring. I think I’ll always be wondering whether he really had a ring made for me, or if it was just something that he made up. Something that he made her see.”

Will feels the heat of her anger and her sadness on his neck and on his face. He closes his eyes to the strength of it. Two years is a long time to think that your best friend is dead. Two years is a long time to wait for bodies to fall, trying to catch traces of the Ripper.

He wants to promise Mapp that nothing like that would ever happen again, but he knows that he can’t make any promises, and he knows that it has happened again. Hannibal had hidden away Abigail, and she had pushed Alana, glass breaking under her, like the glass that shattered when Miriam Lass shot bullets from Jack Crawford’s gun, over and over again.

And that’s where he finds her when they arrive at Hannibal Lecter’s house. Alana Bloom is standing at the place where she had lain. The space is cleaned, good as new, because the FBI investigators have already came and bagged everything. Her face is craned upward toward the window.

She looks like a painting, a biblical scene in a church. She looks illuminated by the afternoon sunlight like stained glass, a myriad of colors converging into a scene.

Ardelia Mapp has opted to stay in the car. Will ventures outside and walks toward Alana. Brushes against her and looks up himself, at the broken window that’s now obscured by the criss-cross yellow lines of crime scene tape.

“You’re here,” she says, when she notices the nudge of his shoulder. “I thought you wanted to stay and work.”

“No,” Will says. “You know how my mind works. I wanted to stay away, but I need to come back.” He wants to move forward and touch the side of her face, giving her a sideways smile, and he thinks she would return it, the touch and the smile. He always _wants_ , reaching over to the opposite end of the bed from Margot, but he doesn’t act, only steps back. Neither of them need that now, not when there’s this breadth of a tragedy between them, bitter food and bitter wine and bitter music.

He closes his eyes. He stretches a shaking hand toward the house.

The pendulum swings.

He sees that night play out behind his eyelids. Alana Bloom, Jack Crawford, Abigail Hobbs, and Will Graham, led to the threshold of death as if by the Pied Piper. Hannibal Lecter feels an ache inside of him. This is a loss. He has given gifts to each and every one of them, and this is the summation of those gifts, human ruination. He has given Jack Crawford truth and friendship; he has saved his wife. He has given Alana Bloom the love of a lover; he has been her mentor and her companion. He has taken Abigail Hobbs from death twice; she is his daughter and the embodiment of eternal recurrence, of the reversal of entropy, because he can see his sister in her eyes.

And then Will Graham. This loss cuts him deeply. He has given Will nearly everything, more than the others. He has saved Will’s life. He has given him things beyond truth, beyond friendship, beyond mentorship, beyond the love of a lover. His Patroclus in false armor. He should have realized the snare earlier, because now, it must end like this. Unlike Achilles and Patroclus, they will not have the next life. (There is no Judas kiss, but their proximity almost lends itself to one: _I forgive you, I forgive you._ )

He can see the rain start to break from the clouds, from the gray. It washes the blood from the face. Will’s coat feels warm on his skin.

Hannibal Lecter leaves. He will search for his next life. He has lost, but he is free.

“We won’t be able to find him,” Will whispers when he opens his eyes, and looks back up at the broken window. “He’s too clever for that. No matter how many lists we make, no matter how many maps we mark. He’s going to lay low. He has lost so many things, and he wants to keep his freedom. He’s thinking a dozen steps ahead of us. He’s reading the newspapers, picking up false identities. He’s ready to kill anyone who catches a glimpse of him.”

Alana stares at him. “Will,” she says, and it sounds like a chastisement, it sounds like a refusal. “Is that what you think, or what he thinks?”

Before he can say anything, she says, “I know it’s important for you to get into his head. But people like him, people who think like him - it’s narcissism, Will. He thinks that he’s invincible and uncatchable. _Don’t_ think too much like him. Think like someone who’s going to catch him.”

She gestures to Ardelia Mapp’s car. “You came here with Ardelia Mapp, Will. Why does she think you’re here?”

“She said,” Will says, the words tumbling in a rush, “that Miriam Lass was happy to hear that I’m on the task force. It sounded like a certainty, Alana, that I’m going to catch him. Officer Stewart thought the same. The world thinks that it’s already in motion. I’m going to catch him and it’s going to be easy.” There is something burning at the back of his throat, and Will thinks he’s going to be sick. Hannibal Lecter is still in the forefront of his mind, clamoring with his invulnerability and his confidence and his fucking _sadness._

“He might be called a monster, Will,” Alana says, firm, “but he’s still human. All of us know that - this is why we’re all assembled together on a task force, bound together with something more than MOUs, than paperwork, than public pressure. There’s you, and me, and Jack. There’s Ardelia Mapp, Jimmy Price, Brian Zeller. Ettore De Angelis is gathering evidence and witnesses, taking statements and making agreements. Miriam Lass is watching and trying to remember. I’ve heard from the FBI that the Vergers are funding us, working from behind the scenes. There’s all of Hannibal’s victims’ friends and family, listening and praying and waiting.

“He’s going to make a mistake. We’re going to find patterns, find connections. There will be at least one person out there who will find him, and live, and talk. If there isn’t, then we’re going to still get him somehow.”

Her hand darts forward to close over his wrist. “I come here to remind myself how human he is, in every single kindness and cruelty, Will. Look: this is place where he lived, where he took a girl he loved and had her push me out of a window, before he killed her himself. Look: he told me he planted those flowers with his own hands, and if you look closely, you’ll see the bud of the same type of one flower that was found inside the corpse of Sheldon Isley. Look, Will.”

“I’m looking,” Will says, in response, and he feels...clearer. Clarity. _Every kindness, every cruelty._ All of these small things, all of these people and revelations, will amount to a method to decipher Hannibal Lecter’s madness, to make a path that will locate him. This is a method that he can’t zero in on alone. He needs pieces given to him, by Alana and Ardelia Mapp and Officer Stewart and everybody who wants to catch Hannibal Lecter. He knows what it is, but can’t pinpoint it.

He needs to consult a copycat, someone who can adapt, who can flow into roles with a ruthlessness using more than just mere imagination. He needs to see someone who can force him out of pragmatism, and into action. He needs to see Matthew Brown.

 

* * *

 

Alana crosses the street, leans over the car’s open window, to talk to Ardelia Mapp. She seems to want to give him space. Will’s left alone to thinking, looking, reflecting.

Jack Crawford joins Will at the doorway of Lecter’s house. He glances up, briefly, at the broken window. “Will,” he says, surprised, but not too surprised. “I take it you’re here to look inside? To see the basement yourself?”

Will shakes his head. “I’m not going inside, Jack. I got a good enough look out here. I know what to do.” He pauses, and continues, “You consulted me when I was inside the hospital. I’ll have to do something similar with Matthew Brown.”

Jack’s brow furrows. “I just got news that Brown’s going home later this evening. He was acquitted. I hope you know what you’re doing, Will. You - you weren’t the real deal. But he is dangerous. I _saw_ that mess he left at Sykes’ house. I _saw_ Dr. Lecter standing on a bucket, with a rope on his neck. He’s dangerous, even if he’s going to walk.”

“I know he is,” Will says. “I need his input. I read that interview that Lounds did with him. It gave me the idea.”

“He defended you,” Jack accedes. Of course he’s read it, too; everyone on the task force has to do their utmost to keep up with the media, to monitor which bits of news can stay private or public.

“Because he defended himself that way, too,” Will says. “He called what I have a _gift._ Being able to empathize, to understand. He has what I have.” He gives Jack a weak curve of a smile. “That’s why he approached me in the first place. The Copycat Killer member club.”

“Club,” Jack says, with a snort. “You didn’t turn out to be what he expected, though.”

“No,” Will says, “I did. Even if I’m not exactly like him, it’s the empathy that’s important.”

He adds, “I suspect De Angelis has told him about Randall Tier, or he’s seen it mentioned in the newspapers already. He’ll be responsive, even if he might try to play games with me.”

“Randall Tier’s death,” Jack says, sober. “We haven’t had a proper talk about that yet. Will, I should have prevented that from happening. We’re damned lucky that De Angelis is immunizing us. It was my responsibility to keep control of the situation. I didn’t know it would go that far. I should’ve pulled you out.”

He’s apologizing. It’s deja vu, Jack Crawford feeling guilty over pushing Will, over responsibility. It had to go that far. It nearly went farther when it came to Freddie Lounds.

“Dr. Lecter needed to see that from me,” Will says. Eye contact. He makes eye contact with Jack. Jack's eyes are a warm dark brown, genuine, open, and familiar. “I’ll always regret it, Jack. I felt like him, and he wanted me to feel like that.”

But Will Graham is not like Hannibal Lecter, because he wouldn’t have murdered his own children, because he wouldn’t have hurt Alana, or Jack, or any innocent person because they were simply _rude._ What he has is fear, fear that can morph into a monster and try to devour other monsters.

He turns to Jack with this thought in mind, and changes the subject. “Don’t guilt yourself over it, Jack. I’m all right. How’s your wife?”

“Bella’s fine, at the moment. She’s hanging on,” Jack says, but at the mention, Will can see hints of weariness, tiredness. “I wanted her to stay in the hospital, but she insists on being home. More quiet there, she tells me.”

He says, “She..she said she had an inkling about what Hannibal was. That she had a feeling, though she didn’t know exactly what it was, that her life was saved on nothing but a whim. That he was more than willing to let her go, the same as he was willing to save her. He fed her some of his food, too, Will.”

“You could take leave, Jack,” Will suggests, gentle advice given in return for Jack’s earlier urging for him to see a counselor. “It’s going to be hard, catching him. You know how he’s like. You should go to your wife.”

“No, Will,” Jack says, his head inclining, a rigid _no_. “I’m going to keep working. I don’t think Bella expects anything else from me. She wants him caught as much as I do. And I owe this much to Miriam and Beverly. I want this case closed. It’s been a long couple of years. It’s only fair that I help end it.”

He casts a harsh smile, but also a sad smile, toward Lecter’s house and says, “I think I’ve been living for the moment when I finally get to see the Chesapeake Ripper being led away in chains.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

The clock is ticking for Matthew’s time at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Mentally Insane. When he is escorted from his cell, he’s expecting it to be his therapist for his last session.

Instead, he’s pleasantly surprised by the sight of Will Graham in the privacy room. Will Graham is standing there, bearing a file full of papers, his feet shifted in a way that suggests that he feels unfamiliar being on this side of the table, not handcuffed against it.

“Welcome back, Mr. Graham,” Matthew says, raising a hand and hearing the mental clanking sound it makes. “I didn’t know I would be having a homecoming party.”

“I need you to consult on something,” Graham says, straightforward, blunt, without even a greeting, or a thank-you for what Matthew did, but of course he’s going to be like this. “For the Chesapeake Ripper case. More specifically, how someone might catch him.”

He puts the file in front of Matthew.

Matthew is, honestly, insulted. He’s not a machine that you feed papers into or dump information through. He thinks he can get Graham’s angle - he’s seeking a killer’s perspective on a killer - but he’s not impressed. He expected better from Graham. It’s simplistic, a child’s answer.

“That’s your speciality,” Matthew says. “Not mine. I’m just an ex-orderly, Mr. Graham. Not a federal investigator.”

“No,” Graham says, and gives him that same smile he had before. It’s Matthew’s own smile back at him. “Show me, Matthew. You saw what I did when Jack consulted me, and I know you can do it, too. _Show me._ ”

Matthew shivers. His tongue darts out to wet his mouth, and he sees that Graham knows how _alike_ they are, how that missing piece is not merely about the want for killing, but the ability to understand.

He opens the file. Looks at the pictures, fingers wavering over the shapes and forms. He knows most of Lecter’s story, having followed it in the papers, but the photographs are mostly new to him. He closes his eyes and becomes Will Graham.

Then he thinks of Hannibal Lecter. Drowning, bloody, and very nearly a corpse. He thinks of how Lecter moved and swam and spoke. He does not care for dragons and full moons and becoming, but it’s familiar, it’s close, slipping into a mind like this one. He can feel his heart beating in his chest, and he knows what _hunger_ is. In this version of events, Lecter’s murders have become his murders, and he’s the Chesapeake Ripper himself.

He opens his eyes, and finds Will Graham’s blue-eyed gaze fixed on his, his attention drawn into the change.

“Will,” he says, through almost unmoving lips. Lecter’s accent is in the name; his voice is pitched lower than usual.

Graham says, shakily, but his voice sure, “Alana said that you’re human. In every kindness and cruelty. That you make mistakes, and through that, I can catch you. I don’t know how, Hannibal. I don’t think that I can.”

The tone of their conversation has changed. It’s more intimate. Graham is still standing, but he’s closer to Matthew - but he’s not quite Matthew, not right now.

Matthew feels a smile pull at his mouth. “If I can be caught, you would be the one to do it. Only you.”

Graham’s eyes widen. He says, “When you stabbed me, I told you that I _changed_ you. Is that your mistake?”

“Is love a mistake, Will?”

 _Love_?

And then Matthew shakes Hannibal Lecter off his body, forcing the presence to evaporate like smoke. He gives Graham a snarl of an expression, the handcuffs jerking suddenly at his movement. The accent is gone, and he’s never been more furious in his life. “Mr. Graham, I am not going to play some _sick surrogate_ of your therapist. If you’re here, you’re here for me.”

“That’s not what I was doing,” Graham says, with an exhaled breath, but he backs away when he sees that Matthew’s dropped the mask. Increases the distance.

“Don’t,” Matthew breathes. He says, “Sit down, Mr. Graham. Let’s try this another way.”

“What--?”

“Tell me how you think. We’re going to do exactly what you do together. Not my imitation of you doing it, but how you do it. What do you see when you first close your eyes?”

Graham sits down. His hands are very, very close to Matthew’s handcuffed ones. He closes his eyes, which Matthew mirrors. “I see a pendulum.”

“What sound does it make?”

“It sounds like a _frum_ ,” Graham says, and Matthew doesn’t need to have his eyes open to know that Graham’s smiling. “I can hear the hum of white noise.”

“Good,” Matthew murmurs. “Now think of Dr. Lecter. Out in the world somewhere with Bedelia Du Maurier. Eating fine food, wearing a suit and tie. Do you think you can find him?”

“There’s so many places he could be,” Graham says, his eyelids fluttering. “I know which countries he’s been to before. Which countries he enjoys or would enjoy for the culture: for the food, for the music, for the architecture. But I can’t definitively eliminate any possibilities.”

He can see the world as Will Graham sees it. It’s crowded, noisy, hectic, with Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier staying to the shadows.

“He’s not there,” Matthew agrees. “It’s his territory, wherever he settles for the moment, and he’s going to protect himself. He’s paying attention to the news. If there’s any sightings about anywhere near where he is, he’s prepared to take off. He most likely has a knife with him. Du Maurier might also have weapons. He’s taught her, he’s primed her, for killing.”

“If we try to chase him, he’ll vanish.”

“Tricky little birds,” Matthew says. “But you know what to do, Mr. Graham. You’ve always known how to get him. Focus. How did you try to catch him with Agent Crawford?”

“A trap,” Graham says. “A fishing lure. He’s a hunter - thinks like one - but I thought that I could reel him in.”

“Yes. ‘If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.’”

When Matthew opens his eyes, he feels Graham’s palms against his. It’s not a tight grip, but a laying on of hands, like a mutual blessing, a mutual transference. Matthew has never felt so much like himself before, and he lets his hands pull away after stroking a line across Graham’s skin, fingertips lingering. Graham doesn’t seem to have felt it. His eyes are still closed, and his face is calm, focused. Matthew shuts his own eyes again.

“Very good, Mr. Graham,” he says, gently. “You have to lower your bait again. You know what makes him bite. Here’s what you have to do…”

It’s a sparse outline of a plan. Will Graham and the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force will have to add to it, alter it, enhance it, for the following months to come.

 

* * *

 

The blue of evening has set in. When Matthew walks out of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane, wearing his rumpled clothes (his tan jacket, slacks, a white shirt), he inhales the night air, feels a breeze play over his cheeks. There are no more chains shackled to him, no more restraints, and no more bars. He’s glad to be free of his chatty, concerned therapist, who is, frankly, more irritating than the late Dr. Frederick Chilton.

Will Graham is waiting for him there outside, his back against the hospital sign. _Criminally Insane_ , the two words say above his head like a halo. Matthew thinks that Freddie Lounds would find it an amusing picture.

“Haven’t gone yet?” Matthew asks. He stops walking at the last step of the stairs. He puts his hands in his jacket pockets, and smiles at Graham.

“You don’t have anywhere to go,” Graham says.

“No,” Matthew says. “I don’t. I’ll find someplace.”

The lease of the apartment he rented has already expired, since he hasn’t been there to make any payments. He doesn’t have a lot of money on him, either. It’s not as if he’s been working, or as if working as an orderly pays much. But he’s been in tougher situations before.

Then, slow, hesitant, as if the words are being wrenched out of him, Graham says, “You can come with me.”

A second surprise of the day.

“Don’t pity me, Mr. Graham,” Matthew says. “That’s the last thing that I want from you. And you know that I’m dangerous. That I might be like you, but not completely. You don’t want what happened with Lecter to happen again. _Be afraid._ ”

“I’m always afraid,” Graham says, his mouth twisted in a smile. “I don’t need you to worry over my own well being for me. I survived him.”

“Barely,” Matthew interjects.

“Come with me,” Graham says again, ignoring Matthew’s interruption. “You can work with the task force, Matthew. It would be better for you. Productive.”

Matthew can see the implied message. Their little session left an impression on Graham. He thinks that Matthew could be an advisor, a consultant. He doesn’t want Matthew to kill indiscriminately, like how Andrew Sykes died, how Hannibal Lecter killed. He wants...reformation, from Matthew. He thinks that they’re alike and this can work.

 _You don’t know what ghosts are in my head_ , Matthew doesn’t say out loud.

But he likes the way their hands and their minds had aligned together, if only for awhile.

He would like to finish the job when it comes to Hannibal Lecter, even if it doesn’t necessarily end in death. Perpetual imprisonment would be a good look on Lecter. It would suit him: being left in a cage somewhere, while the world hates and fears him, until it begins to slowly forget him. He’s just another madman locked in a box, exactly where he belongs.

Yet when it comes down to it, he wants to know _why_ Will Graham wants him, in particular.

“Mr. Graham,” Matthew says, “you could have come up with that plan yourself. It was in you. I only reminded you. You told me that you were able to pull similar stunts on him yourself. And even Agent Crawford could have come up with it. It’s an updated version of a trick out of the FBI’s own book: take pictures of Mafia members at certain private gatherings. You don’t need me.”

His feet shuffle on that step of the stairs, and he tilts his head to peer at the sky. He didn’t have to look at it. He knows it’s a full moon tonight, the body of it glowing white behind clouds. Maybe there is one less family out there breathing.

Graham looks at him. Quietly, he says, “I’m going to tell you the truth, Brown. When I emphasize with killers, I become them. I stand at a scene, or I concentrate on a file, and I can get inside their head. I always do it alone. Jack leaves me to think. To make the pendulum swing again.”

He says, “I didn’t do that with you. I’ve never done that before. To project and understand someone without entirely becoming them. That was _collaboration_. It was different.”

Matthew thinks of how he led Graham through it, talked him through it. No, it wasn’t precisely collaboration. It was stabilization. Hands and thoughts aligned. It’s a different sort of becoming.

“You’d trust me with your head,” Matthew says.

“I don’t know if I can trust you at all,” Graham says. “But I need to catch Dr. Lecter. I need to think like myself and like him.”

With a low laugh of disbelief, Matthew says, “You want me keep you sane _._ ”

Graham casts a glance at the sign behind him. At the hospital where both of them had been imprisoned, kept in cells without anything except their imaginations.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

 

* * *

 

Will Graham’s house looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere, a plain of grass surrounding the house in the center. Matthew eyes an unmarked car parked somewhere down the road with a suspicious glance, but knows that Graham’s safety is probably a real concern for the FBI.

“They didn’t come with you to the hospital,” Matthew says.

Graham shrugs. “The hospital’s safe. I told Jack what I was doing. He knew where I was.”

“But he didn’t know you would be bringing me home like another one of your strays, did he?”

He takes Graham’s silence as a no _._

Graham has an ungodly amount of dogs. Matthew can’t help but crack a smile at the sight of them. He’s always been in and out of apartments, which never allowed pets, and it would be too much trouble to have a pet when he’s traveling, wandering around places. A cream-white dog stops to sniff Matthew cautiously, and then when Matthew lets the dog closer, he’s suddenly engulfed in a handful of fur and fluff, the dog wagging its tail excitedly.

“What’s his name?” Matthew asks, stroking the dog’s muzzle.

“Her,” Graham says. “That’s Sheila.”

“Sheila,” Matthew says to her, repeating the name back almost solemnly. He looks around at the other dogs and starts to greet each one of them by name, peering at the side of their collars. Rocky. Winston. Max. Buster. His fingers catch the ragged contour of a scar when they move down Buster’s side, and he says, “Hey. I got one just like that, Buster.”

Graham clears his throat. Gestures to a couch, which now has the addition of a white pillow and blankets. “You can sleep here.”

“Thanks.”

He watches Graham leave the room, headed off to his own bed. Most of the dogs follow Graham, or trail off to go somewhere else, leaving Matthew with Sheila and Buster. Matthew looks down at them and says, “You should follow your owner, y’know. I won’t be able to sleep when the moon’s like this.”

He’s always like this during the full moon. Even when he couldn’t see it inside the hospital, he knew it was there, and he knows how it calls to Francis Dolarhyde. He told Matthew once that blood in the moonlight looked black. He told Matthew that he didn’t want to leave anyone in a house that he had chosen alive. The pets first, then the family. He had told Matthew a story of the hanging of a cat, of the death of chickens, when he was a boy, and somehow - somehow - this is an inclination that hasn’t stuck to Matthew, hasn’t stayed. He’s an animal himself: an eagle from those verses of Revelations, a hawk from an overarching metaphor.

Matthew pushes the door open, walks out to the front porch of the house. The moon is clearer here. The wood of the porch is cool under his bare feet.

 _Look_ , he tells himself. There’s no blood to be made black. There’s only Will Graham inside the house. There’s only Matthew Brown inside his own head. And he realizes that Sheila and Buster have followed him, and he has no desire to wring their necks or set them on fire or cut their throats or poison them. The moon is beautiful in its own right without the twist of murder. He just wants to sleep.

“ _When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place_ ,” Matthew murmurs. “ _What are humans that you are mindful of them, mere mortals that you care for them_?”

He doesn’t notice Graham watching him from the open door, at first, but then hears an intake of breath, the shuffle of his feet, the shift of his shoulders. He’s wearing a plain white shirt and boxers now, apparently his sleeping attire. There’s curiosity in his eyes.

“Lunar cycle,” Matthew says, by way of explanation, his voice rough as if he has gravel lodged in his throat.

A pause. “You?”

“No. An old friend.”

He wonders how many killers Graham has encountered who were on the moon cycle. He wonders whether Graham has ever looked over any of Francis’ kills - which are rough, undetected, and little, so far, no noticeable M.O. set into stone. It’s only the Marlowes that Matthew knows of, but it will build up to more one day, and the pattern will be noticed.

It’s very easy to be haunted and it’s very easy to be taken over, invaded, like this.

He bends down to set his fingers against Buster’s scar. It’s not a gunshot wound like his, obviously, but it looks like it had hurt. Maybe he had an abusive former owner. Maybe he got in a fight with another dog. Maybe he had his side raked by the claws or teeth of a bigger animal.

Graham says, “You should get dogs inside, Brown. The moon’s bright. It’ll make one howl, and that starts a chain reaction among all of them. It’s their song, but it’s a loud type of song.”

“That sounds almost beautiful, Mr. Graham,” Matthew says.

At that, he sees a flash of a smile on the side of Graham’s mouth. But he listens, retreats to Graham’s house, and sits on his designated couch. Graham sits beside him, his hands clasped together.

“I do owe you a favor,” Graham says. “I can - we can walk through this one. If you want. If it works the same for you.”

It’s a serious offer. He searches Graham’s face. He watches how the moonlight shines through the window and makes Graham look lit up in blue. Moonlight illuminates more than blood.

“Okay,” Matthew says, with a nod. “Okay. Go ahead.”


	7. Chapter 7

The last place Will expected to be is on his couch during the dead of the night with Matthew Brown, making an overture of empathy, both of them with their eyes shut. But then, he didn’t expect to get any more involved with Brown at all. He knows that trusting Brown is risky, that Brown is unpredictable, especially with his ease of imitation, but he doesn’t think that he has anything to lose.

If he’s trusting Brown with his head, it’s only fair that Brown gives him his in exchange.

And he realizes, at some level, this is _using_ Matthew Brown again, who willingly went to hang Hannibal Lecter without complaint. He was Will’s gun and his knife; right now, he’s an extension of Will’s empathy. Maybe it’s callous and maybe it’s not - Hannibal Lecter trying to find room for himself in Will’s head, urging and whispering and putting gentle emphasis on his name - but Matthew Brown is yet another piece that will finally grant Will his reckoning.

“What do you see when you first close your eyes?” Will says. Behind his own, the pendulum is swinging, humming, waiting.

“The full moon,” Brown says. “Just the moon, shining bright.”

His voice is nearly a lisp. So this is who Brown must have borrowed it from; this is someone who Brown emulated before the Copycat Killer.

“What is it looking down on?”

“Me,” Brown says. “Or rather, him. He has a gun in his pocket. He’s prepared for this for weeks. He wants to make blood spill under the moon. It looks black that way, not like blood at all. He needs to see the moon.”

Will picks up the thread of the scene, recalling from experience, “He likes yards without fences or hedges or trees. He needs a clear view.”

“When he’s finished, he’ll go outside,” Brown says. “But he’ll have to _start_ first. And he starts with violent entry. He kicks down the door, with his gun in hand. He starts to shoot whoever comes toward him, and then the next person. He’ll shoot until everyone’s dead. He’ll shoot with the blood splattered everywhere.”

Will knows what occurs subsequently.

He says, “I shoot him twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. He will die watching me take what is his away from him. This is my design.

“I shoot her expertly through the neck. This is not a fatal wound. The bullet misses every artery. She is paralyzed before it leaves her body. Which doesn’t mean she can’t feel pain. It just means she can’t do anything about it. This is my design.”

Will opens his eyes and says, “I know who this is. You shot Andrew Sykes like this. Who have you been copycatting in your past, Matthew?”

“A dragon,” Brown answers, his eyes now open, wavering, uncertain. “A dragon, Mr. Graham.” He runs a hand through his hair, and says, “I don’t know where he is now. He travels places. He goes everywhere; he might not even be in the country.”

“Did you help him plan the murders of the Marlowes?”

“No,” Brown says. “I was in Baltimore by then, working in the hospital. He doesn’t kill with a partner. _He doesn’t need me.”_ It seems as if Brown has crumpled, the last sentence a hiss.

“And that’s why you found me, when you thought I was a serial killer,” Will says. He sighs. “You have to give the police, the FBI, someone, his name. There’s a hotline for anonymous tips, or you can send a letter.”

“Or you won’t, in good conscience, bother asking my help with catching Dr. Lecter,” Brown says, completing what’s unsaid. “I - fine. I’ll give him to you. That won’t help you catch him. He’s tricky. He can blend in; he seems unnoticeable. He’s less memorable than Lecter and Du Maurier. He’ll be caught once his methods are finally noticed, Mr. Graham. Once he gets greedy, escalates, and keeps on striking, leaving a traceable signature.”

“But by then, at least, we’ll know his name,” Will says.

“I’ll give him to you,” Brown says again. “I’ll give you my dragon and I’ll give you your Judas.”

He looks tired. Will catches himself thinking that he knows how that feels, the first night out of the hospital and weighted with his reckoning. He looks at the moon, and sees it how Brown sees it, and his mind feels jagged, splintered, between identities and consciousnesses. The way that Brown emphasizes is total, utter: a speech disorder, a weapon, an affinity for the full moon, and who knows what else. He doesn’t sympathize with Matthew Brown, who is cold blooded and vicious and just another killer that Will’s used to chasing, but Will _knows_ how it feels.

“Get some sleep,” Will says. He moves back toward to his bedroom, but he’s delayed when Brown calls his name.

“Mr. Graham?”

Will turns his head.

“What happened to Buster?”

“Randall Tier,” Will says. He’s almost been waiting for Brown to bring Tier up, but he didn’t anticipate that it would be indirect, roundabout.

Brown’s eyes almost seem to glitter in the darkness. “I wonder how it felt. Reclamation. You did it without me.”

Will doesn’t say anything in response. He silently makes his way to his bed, feeling Sheila tread behind at his heels, and when he pulls the blanket over himself he wonders if Matthew Brown is sleeping beside Buster the same way Will does: touching the scar and thinking of his own.

When he dreams, he dreams of how Brown’s fingers drew a line across his hands. His mind is quiet. He knows how he can catch Hannibal Lecter. Matthew Brown is guiding him, anchoring him. It’s not like sessions with Hannibal, who would tell him to imagine dark things and relish them.

When he dreams, he dreams of the full moon and the dragon. There is nothing screaming at him, only a murmur of Bible verses. There is no immersion into a flood. This is a balance and a counter-balance, even without trust being strung between them.

 

* * *

 

He’s awakened, early in the morning, by a text from Jack Crawford.

_I’m outside._

Will’s FBI shadows must have informed him about his impromptu guest. Will hurries to get dressed, throwing his green fishing jacket over his shirt, tugging on pants. Brown is still asleep on the sofa when Will passes by him on the way to the front door. He has a hand curled around Buster, and his disheveled hair is falling over his eyes.

Jack is on the porch, waiting for him, his head angled toward one of the windows, which is half-hidden by a curtain. “Is he inside?”

“Still sleeping,” Will says.

“Why the hell did you take him home?” Jack’s mad. Of course he is.

“Brown has a plan. He would actually do some good if he worked with the task force, despite the...legitimate doubts that we have about him.”

And Will tells him.

Jack is gaping at him when he’s finished. Skeptical. “Will, what you’re asking - that’s a joint effort between the task force and the media. And it’s going to be costly. Lecter’s too smart: it worked with Abel Gideon, it worked with Freddie Lounds, but it’s not going to work again.”

“The Vergers would be willing to pay, if I asked,” Will says. “Freddie Lounds has an agenda that would fit very much with our own. As for any other media outlets - we know that they can cooperate if it’s as big as this. You know that one case that was closed nine years ago. Those two times that Hannibal responded to are proof, not exceptions. We can get him, Jack. This won’t end like last time.”

“I also know of one case that I tried to solve, long before you came,” Jack says. “I consulted a serial killer who was on Death Row, and he had essentially nothing to offer except an implausible scheme. Pompous advice, hot air. He just wanted to be noticed before he was executed. I know you want to catch Lecter, but crazy guys like these don’t give you an instant solution to things.”

“You’re still using that word,” Will says, with a crooked smile. “Jack. Of course Brown’s original plan isn’t going to work. We’re going to have to make it _more_ elaborate. Lecter won’t buy it unless we layer it. Build up to it. Layers and layers of a story he wants to hear, to appeal to his sense of the dramatic and the tragic, and he will bite. I _know_ he will.”

“You really believe this is going to catch him.” And it seems like Jack’s listening, now. After all that they’ve been through, he does have faith in Will. The last attempt against Hannibal Lecter may have culminated in blood, but there’s another way they can do this.

Will says, “Brown alluded to a saying before he explained. That one about Muhammad and a mountain. The mountain can’t come to Muhammad, Jack. We’re not going to be able to manually find him on our own, blindly searching through countries. We have to _make_ Muhammad come to the mountain.”

“This proposal of yours and Brown’s is intense. Complex,” Jack says, pensive. “You’re right about Lecter’s melodrama. We saw that in every crime scene he left behind. But you’re going to have to bring this up with the rest of the task force, Will. If you think it’s consistent with Lecter’s psyche...it might just fly after all.”

“You might just get the arrest you’ve wanted,” Will says, and when he sees Jack take a quick, inquiring look at him, he feels something tight in his chest and realizes, _I’m back. I can win._

 

* * *

 

He arrives at the task force headquarters in Baltimore hours later, with Matthew Brown in tow.

Brown is dressed in clothes that Will has lent him, seeing as he only has the clothes on his back. He’s cheerful in the morning, and says nothing of last night’s conversation. During breakfast and in the car, Brown only asks Will questions about his dogs (which Will answers with some bewilderment), or waxes on about gruesome or unusual crimes he’s read about from books or the news, or just simply stays silent. There’s something comforting about Brown, even in his strangeness and morbidness, that Will can’t put a finger on. He’s not the equivalent of someone who’s _safe_ , but he’s almost...normal, human. Will has almost forgotten how young Brown actually is.

Brown greets Ettore De Angelis with a playful, “Good afternoon, Mr. De Angelis.”

De Angelis almost jumps out of his seat, his pen skittering out of his fingers and onto his computer keyboard. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here, Brown?”

Brown grins like a smug Cheshire Cat at De Angelis’ reaction, as if to say: _See? I knew he was scared of me._

“He’s with me,” Will says. “He’ll be a consultant.”

“Are you serious?”

“Did Jack Crawford tell you?” Will asks.

De Angelis shakes his head. “He told me that you’ve got a newfangled plan in the works to catch Lecter. I didn’t know anything about recruiting the alleged but acquitted murderer, Mr. Graham.”

“Well,” Will says, “that’s why I’m here, Mr. De Angelis. We need you to check and make sure that whatever we’ll be doing will be kept as legal as possible, within reason. It hasn’t been cleared with the rest of the task force higher-ups, but I’m hoping that they’ll approve of it, and I can say we have your permission to go forward.”

He hands De Angelis a sheet of paper, covered with notes he had scrawled during breakfast. De Angelis adjusts his glasses, reads it, and scrutinizes Will and Brown.

“This is not a straightforward game plan,” De Angelis says. “This is a - a sting operation, for a lack of a better term.”

“I allegedly got him in one trap,” Brown says. “I can get him into another.”

De Angelis throws Brown a dubious look, and turns to Will. “And you don’t mind doing this? Acting out a farce to this degree?”

“We have the resources and the manpower,” Will says, steadily.

“He’s not talking about that,” says a voice. Alana Bloom is standing at the doorway of De Angelis’ office. “Will, Jack told me what you’re up to. I need to talk to you.”

“All right,” Will says, with a sigh, and excuses himself from De Angelis’ office, telling Matthew Brown to stay put.

Alana directs Will to a deserted break room in the building, populated by coffee makers and lounge chairs. It still smells like coffee. She continues the conversation if there hadn’t been an intermission between it. “Ettore meant mentally _._ You know what happened last time, when you became Hannibal’s friend. _Randall Tier_ , Will. And you know that you have to be careful with Matthew Brown. What he did was practically torture. It was only my intervention that stopped him. Stopped _you._ ”

“Alana,” Will says, “I don’t - I don’t think I’ll be as drawn into this one as last time. It’s not the same. Trust me.”

“My pep talk may have motivated you,” she says, “but you need to think how this might play out. Hannibal didn’t just hurt _you_. Fallout, Will.”

“You know it’ll work,” Will says. “You know him as well as I do. I have to catch him.”

Then he can’t stop talking. There’s something that he hasn’t told Alana about yet. He talks in a dusty jumble of words, and it sounds like a contorted fairy tale.

“Let me tell you a story, Alana. You mentioned the Vergers, earlier. How they’re funding the task force. Dr. Lecter was their psychiatrist. For the siblings Margot and Mason. Now, Mason is the heir to the Verger fortune and dynasty. His sister isn’t, and he...hurts her. And she wants to hurt him back.

“Margot found a loophole. That if she had a child, a male child, and Mason was to suddenly disappear, then she would have control of the fortune, of the dynasty. Do you know who told her about this loophole? Dr. Lecter did. He admired her, for surviving her brother. For wanting to hurt him.

“And Dr. Lecter, he - he thought Mason was very rude. Very coarse. Very much like the pigs that he fattened and slaughtered. When it came down to it, he loathed Mason more than he admired Margot.

“One day, he realized that he had suitable incentive. Suitable leverage. He told Mason Verger that Margot Verger was pregnant, possibly with a male child, which Mason couldn’t stand for. Imagine that: being usurped from your throne by your sister, who you’ve controlled all your life. So Mason arranges for Margot to have an accident. A little accident.

“Dr. Lecter did that. Mason Verger is vile, despicable, in his own right, but Hannibal treated it like a game, with different pieces to be manipulated, with no regard for their worth.”

“Leverage,” Alana says, repeats, with a slow horror. “Will, why would he--?”

“He wanted me to kill Mason Verger for him,” Will says. “ _My son,_ Alana. Margot Verger’s son.”

He puts his hand on his face and realizes that there is a watery film at the corners of his eyes - it’s nothing. It’s nothing. He feels Alana’s touch on his shoulder.

“This is good timing, actually,” Will says. He shakes away her hand lightly. “I have something to show you. The reason why I brought Matthew Brown onboard.”

 

* * *

 

“Matthew,” Will says, when he re-enters Ettore De Angelis’ office, “I need you to get into my head again.”

Brown is nonchalantly sitting on the edge of De Angelis’ desk - the attorney is gone, most likely left to spread news of their plan to the task force superiors - and he smiles when he sees Will. “You always use my first name when you want something from me, don’t you?”

But he motions for Will to come closer to him. “It’s fine. We can do this again. Is this a demonstration for Dr. Bloom?”

Alana is watching from the corner, her arms crossed. The trepidation from their previous discussion is still in her expression, but she still has that psychiatrist’s eye on her: inquisitiveness, especially when it comes with Will.

Will moves toward De Angelis’ desk. He feels slightly smaller than Brown, who is perched there a head taller above Will, like the bird that he had claimed himself to be.

“You’re trembling,” Brown says quietly. “What ever did you discuss with the lovely doctor, Mr. Graham?”

Margot Verger. Mason Verger. Hannibal Lecter. And that unborn child. It was a secret that he held to himself, an ache that recalls to him Abigail Hobbs: wanting to take her fishing, wanting to be her father. It’s a reminder that Hannibal Lecter took almost everything as much as he gave, and Will has to catch him and he has to stay here, stay focused _._ He needs more than the mantra that Hannibal had given him: _My name is Will Graham and I’m in Baltimore, Maryland--_

Will blinks, rapidly. “Please, just-- go, Matthew.”

“I’m giving you your Judas, my dragon, and your sanity,” Brown says, with that same smile again when he had told Will, _You always use my first name when you want something from me_ \- this murderous psychopath who is too willing, too loyal - and he says, “Close your eyes.”

He says, “What do you see when you first close your eyes?”

Will knows that Brown has reciprocated the action. “The pendulum,” he says. The ambient hum of it swinging. The way the colors pass over him, and he’s falling into every scene that he’s lived and relived. One scene comes to the forefront of his mind, the one that he used to retreat into when he was at the hospital, at the trial, and in his dreams.

“I can hear the sound of running water,” Will says. “I’m standing beside a river. I’m fishing.”

_Put your head back. Close your eyes. Wade into the quiet of the stream._

The river shouldn’t make him shake like this. He thinks: fish and reeds and the woods and the sky. This isn’t bleeding underneath Hannibal Lecter’s touch, the teacup shattering, shattered, and Abigail Hobbs choking. She looks the same as she did when he first saw her: _Why didn’t she die, then? Why didn’t she? She lived for her life to be taken away._

“I can hear the insects buzzing near the surface of the river,” Brown says. “The wind is making the grass whisper. I can hear birds calling to each other.”

And, as if in a burst of intuition, Brown asks, “Who are you fishing with, Mr. Graham?”

“Abigail Hobbs,” Will says. “You - you didn’t know her, but she was, is, beautiful. She’s wearing a green fishing jacket, and her fishing pole is making ripples on the water.”

“The Minnesota Shrike’s daughter.”

Will makes a noise of disagreement. “No. Her father tried to teach her to be a hunter, but she would have liked fishing. I thought she was mine. And Dr. Lecter thought so, too.

“And she’s smiling by the river, Matthew. She’s turning and she’s looking at a boy without a name.”

And then he feels Brown’s hands press against his shoulders, fingers digging deeply into fabric. He seems to follow the thread of the vision: a daughter, a son. “He has your eyes. What happened to him?”

 _He has your eyes._ Blue, like the river itself. He has dirty blond hair like Will had when he was younger, when his father was younger. He has Margot Verger’s voice, already deep, already throaty, and he holds himself like her in posture. His uncle killed him, and his sister’s other father killed him.

“Gone,” Will says, his voice hollow. “He’s just a scar on his mother’s stomach. He’s not her legacy any more. He’s just a boy without a name in my head.”

Brown’s fingers drift into Will’s hair, resting there. He whispers, “It’s okay, Will. You can have them, just for now. Just for a couple of minutes. You’re going to avenge them. Maybe the feds are going to hang him in my place. But right now, I’m there, too - can you see me? - and we’re all fishing.

“The kid does have a name, but I bet that it’s a stupid name. A name that you’ve given to a dog you’ve had.”

Will opens his mouth to protest. He thinks that Margot would give him an ornate name, the kind bestowed on children by the wealthy, but Brown hushes him.

“Abigail Hobbs is helping him reel in a fish. You’re looking over their shoulders and giving them advice to stay steady, steady, and she’s biting her lip in concentration and he’s giggling. It looks like, for a moment, that they’re pulling up nothing, that maybe the fish got away. But they tug, and they caught the fish, Will. They caught it. Abigail and the kid are beaming at you. I’m shaking my head, because I’m crap at fishing and you’re the real fisherman know-it-all from the South, but _you have them_ , _Will_ , and _you have the fish_.”

Matthew Brown is standing by the riverbank. He is holding something shining in his hands, which catches the sun. It’s a knife to cut the fish.

Will opens his eyes. He sees Alana, who looks honestly shocked, but transfixed by the proceedings. He sees Matthew Brown, whose voice he realized lapsed into different pronunciations, different intonations, when he finished directing Will. He pulls his hand away from Will’s hair.

“Boston,” Brown says in explanation, with as shrug, his voice going back to its usual pitch. “You’re not the only one who covers up your old accent, Mr. Graham.”

Will turns his head up to look at Brown, and says, “Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

When they have another private moment alone in the break room, Alana asks, “Do you think this - whatever you have with Matthew Brown - might be unhealthy? I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s not precisely hypnosis or role playing. He’s able to feed back your imagination, your empathy, reflect it, and make his own suggestions. It seems...invasive.”

She says, “Are you seeking to replace whatever space that Hannibal Lecter had in your head with Matthew Brown?”

“He’s not looking to take over my head,” Will says. If anything, it might be the other way around. His fingers flex in a spasm at his side. “I don’t trust him, not exactly. It’s not reasonable; it doesn’t logically make sense. He’s in my head and I manage to feel somewhat stable. He’s a copycat, and he has a degree of what I have. I want to make use of that. It - it helps.”

Alana says, “I’m so sorry about - about what you told me. I wish I could’ve done something; I wish I had known. I wish that I could’ve stopped Hannibal, with everything he’s done.”

“There’s nobody out there in existence who can tell him to stop.” He looks at Alana. “No matter how much anybody told him how much they loved him. He wouldn’t stop.”

“And you think this design of yours and Matthew Brown’s will catch him?”

Will smiles over the word _design._ “It sounds like the right bait that he’ll fall for.”

And she nods. “It does sound very much like him. It’s farfetched. It takes chances, relies on multiple factors, but he would come back. Just promise me that you’ll do your best to not jeopardize anything this time. Don’t compromise your own morals, your own state of mind. Let this work. Let there be little fallout, or none at all.”

“I’ll try,” Will says. He amends, “We’ll try,” because this is very much a design that demands Alana’s help, Jack’s help, Ettore De Angelis’ help, and on. The pieces they share with him.

“You _should_ see a real therapist, Will,” she says. “You shouldn’t solely rely on Matthew Brown.”

“That seems compromising,” he says. He doesn’t want to be psychoanalyzed by a stranger, never mind his hang-ups about Hannibal Lecter.

And then he and Alana trade glances at each other comically and realize that’s another idea, right there.

 

* * *

 

The task force superiors, after some convincing, greenlight ‘The Sting’, as Ettore De Angelis flippantly dubs the plan.

The Chesapeake Ripper Task Force commander and spokesperson - Joseph Ballard - gives a location during a press conference: Italy. It’s one of the more likelier places, a conclusion taken from Dr. Lecter’s possessions and Alana and Will’s lists. The task force has reached out to Italian authorities and have forwarded them copies of Lecter’s Italy-related drawings, pictures of his books, and the paintings on his wall.

“Jack’s idea,” Will tells Brown, as they watch the television screen. “It _is_ a legitimate hotspot. But it’s also a good place to direct attention onto. Misdirection. A red herring.”

There’s a flicker in Brown’s eyes at the fish-related metaphor, images of the sun and the river still left behind in his head as well as Will’s, but he doesn’t bring it up.

“Italy,” Brown says, thoughtfully. “Interesting. There was a serial killer who didn’t get caught there. Maybe Lecter likes _that_ part of Italy’s history, too. It’s almost reminiscent of what happened to you, y’know. There were people looking into the case and they got accused themselves. And a batshit website reporter a la Freddie Lounds was at the forefront of the witch hunt.”

The task force had just contacted Lounds a couple of hours ago. Will looks at Brown with a ghost of a smile and says, “Don’t let Lounds catch you saying that.”

 

* * *

 

Will has a phone call of his own to make. He dials Margot Verger’s number.

He says, “I need to ask you for a favor.”

“It depends what it is,” she says.

“Can you fund a funeral?”

Margot pauses. “Whose?”

“Mine.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

Matthew falls asleep on the way back to Wolf Trap. He is slumped against the window, the seat belt winding around the side of his face, the hum of the car engine like a lullaby. When he wakes up, they’re at Graham’s house, and Will Graham has his head rested back in his seat. He is staring outside the car’s windshield into the night, his gaze a little numb, a little detached. He’s been waiting for Matthew to wake up.

“What did you dream of?” Graham asks, in that precise monotone of his, as if he’s trying to cover up any real emotion, any real feeling.

“The touch of a child’s hand,” Matthew says, truthfully. When he moves his fingers, he thinks he can feel the water of the river trickle over it. He thinks that he’s disintegrating into a waterfall, into a current, into a tide.

He doesn’t know the whole story. He doesn’t claim to. But he has Will Graham’s sense of loss and regret embedded into his mind, and he lets himself fall back into the water in his dream. He had taken the child’s hand and shown him the fish. He had found Graham in his dream and had recited to him, with a wondering playfulness: _If he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?_

Playing with water is much more different than playing with fire.

Graham parts his lips, soundlessly, and he says, “I didn’t intend to do this. To play Hannibal Lecter with you. To play God. I know what you are. But that doesn’t mean that I have any right to take you over. You could always leave.”

“No,” Matthew says. “What we did - that’s not what that was.”

“You’re giving me _everything_ ,” Graham says. “You’re a copycat. It’s what you did with your dragon. It’s what you always do, Matthew.”

He doesn’t look at Matthew. “When you dressed, this morning. You have tattoos. Was that because of him?”

“The red dragon and the eagle of Revelations. I--”

“You don’t need to stay,” Graham interrupts. “You’ve helped, and I can catch Dr. Lecter without you. I don’t know why - I shouldn’t have let you see that today. I shouldn’t have.”

“You’re wrong, Mr. Graham.”

Matthew reaches out to touch Graham. It’s not the first time he’s done it: there was today. There were the times at the hospital, pulling on Graham’s restraints with careful movements. There was that time in the privacy room, and he partly mimics that now. His palm against the clenched knuckles of one of Graham’s hands lying in his lap.

He says, “You make me feel like myself. Why do you think I chose you in the first place?”

He stepped out of the shadows for Will Graham. He didn’t leave for anyone else. Not for Francis Dolarhyde, who abandoned him; not for Abel Gideon, when he was wearing the mantle of the Chesapeake Ripper while institutionalized; not for Hannibal Lecter, during that time when he could have just loosened the noose and switched the object of his affections. But he couldn’t. It’s Will Graham. It’s always been.

“Mimicry,” Graham says, simply, but he looks thrown _._ “Obsession.”

“Maybe,” Matthew says. “Parts of those. Both of those. But it’s not everything. I can take your river, Mr. Graham. I can take your lost children. I can take your mortal enemy. I can take your pain, and you can take mine. This isn’t a takeover as much as it is reciprocation.”

Graham makes a noise like dry laughter. “ _Reciprocation_ , Brown? You’ve killed for me. You would still kill for me.”

“That was a gift,” Matthew says, softly. “That was a favor. But you’re right, I would. But only if you asked, and to be honest, I don’t want to end up in the hospital again. Right now, this is another story. Understanding someone and being understood back isn’t manipulation. It’s--”

“Trust,” Graham says. Matthew can feel Graham’s knuckles clench tighter, brushing against the skin of his palm. “I told you, Matthew, when I walked out of the hospital with you: I don’t trust you. You shouldn’t have seen my head at all, but I thought that I didn’t have any other options.”

“You don’t,” Matthew says. “Remember, Mr. Graham. How did you feel like when we share headspace?”

And Graham’s fist slackens, and it’s Matthew’s hand on top Graham’s hand, fingers overlapping. He says, in a rasp, “Myself.”

He pulls away, unbuckles his seatbelt with a _snap_ , and leaves the car.

 

* * *

 

Sunday. Will Graham has a day off from the task force, with the first stage of the plan already in place and the second stage currently formulating in Freddie Lounds’ hands. But Graham still has his map; he still has his notes; and Matthew sees him thinking, thinking. The tension of last night’s conversation is present, and he doesn’t ask Matthew to join him.

So Matthew does something completely ordinary. He borrows Graham’s car, finds a nearby church, and goes to mass.

There is something almost cavernous about this church. The walls are made of brick, encircling the pews in a ring. The pattern of bricks are only interrupted by stained glass windows, by statues, by the lights on the walls. A crucifix is hanging above the altar, framed and highlighted by carefully directed lights. It throws an almost perfect shadow onto the bricks.

Matthew had borrowed an old baseball cap of Graham’s, the insignia a white _Z_ across blue - it doesn’t look like Graham uses it - and he had donned it with a vague feeling of guilt, thinking that it’s the wrong cap. It’s strange, that this, of all things from his old city, has stayed with him. Now, he removes the cap.

The mass is all very familiar: the hymns and the prayers and the recitations, the Eucharist and the kneeling and the homily. He remembers, once upon a time, being one of the white robed servers by the altar, carrying the cross and the candles and the book and the gifts.

_Go in peace._

The parishioners trickle out, slowly: greeting each other, speaking with the priest, taking the newsletters handed out by the doors. Matthew watches the stream of them go as he stands in the back of the church. When the church is finally empty, he finally slides into a pew.

Attending mass is an ordinary act, but he feels...ungrounded. What was that one verse again? _The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands._

The structure and formality is comforting, but it’s merely a brief reprieve. When he walks out of the door, he will be swept out into the world of water and fire again, in all its glory and turbulence and conflagration. His only hope is that he’ll come out without blacking out in deep water or getting burned. And it is _fun_ that way. He doesn’t deny his roles in fire and water. But his mind is always spinning, grasping for identity, just as how Will Graham always grasps for balance and stability.

He sees the paradox: knowing who he is when he’s with Will Graham. Graham’s words had bothered him, although he hadn’t said it then. He wants to establish himself; he wants a name for himself, just as Lecter is the Chesapeake Ripper, and Francis thinks he’s a dragon, and how Graham was once known as the Copycat Killer. If establishment cannot be found through mimicry, if it’s not found through the intrinsic artwork of a murder, he doesn’t know what it is.

And this is what makes him crazy.

He decides to try and let one ghost go.

Matthew isn’t much of an artist. But he tries to remember the lines of Francis Dolarhyde’s face, using an envelope that was in the back of a pew. He scrawls the fragments, _for it is in giving that we receive / it is in pardoning that we are pardoned_ , besides the face and the name. He doesn’t think that he believes it

He wonders if there’s a priest in the confessional booth. It won’t be for an apology, because Matthew doesn’t feel sorry for anything, not really, but it will be better than his last confession. He knows it’s empty, though. He knows it’s empty.

He had told Ettore De Angelis that he’s searching for holy things. He wonders how much of that is truth, and how much of that is desperation.

He puts the envelope in his pocket. He walks out of this cave of a church, away from the brightly lit crucifix, and back into the world of fire and water once again.

 

* * *

 

The gym that Hannibal Lecter had frequented in Baltimore is closed, but the same back entrance that Matthew had used earlier, in that night venture, is still open. All he has to do is climb a fence, climb down, and there’s the back door.

Graham will be here in an hour or so, probably in his FBI bodyguards’ car, since Matthew has his car parked outside. Matthew had called him from a payphone by the side of the road, and it was almost a plea disguised as archness, playfulness, but he doesn’t admit it. He leaves the front door unlocked for Graham and waits.

He’s by the end of the pool, Graham’s cap tipped slightly over his eyes. His hands are in his pockets, fingertips brushing against the half-crumpled envelope. The lines of Francis Dolarhyde’s face. His eyes and his smile and his fear and his hate. William Blake and the moon. He had thought that he was letting this ghost go, but it’s still with him.

There are puddles of water at the edges of the pool, which soak his shoes. When he had stood below Hannibal Lecter, it was blood that made his bare feet a light red, and he had noted that. Planned to wash it away. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.

The only light in the room is from the pool, still blue fireflies that project beams.

When the door opens, Will Graham walks through. He has that aura of exhaustion to him, from hours from working and planning and figuring, but he looks at Matthew with those very keen, very alert eyes. He doesn’t walk over to Matthew, just remains standing on the opposite end of the pool, and that works, because voices carry well in this room. They make echoes.

“I want to tell you how I did it,” Matthew says. He lays his tan jacket and the baseball cap to the side. Smiles at Graham wanly. “So you can see how it’s like how to almost catch him.”

He remembers the first person point-of-view. How Graham rendered Francis Dolarhyde. There’s a _Why?_ in Graham’s eyes, but Matthew doesn’t answer it.

“Hannibal Lecter is turning laps in the water. I slip into a lane beside him, treading and treading. He’s fast, but not fast enough. I outpace him, easily, and pull myself to the surface, where I have a tranquilizer waiting for him.

“He sinks like a stone. I could have let him drown, but I didn’t. I will regret it, Mr. Graham, and so will you. But I pull him from the depths, and I _hang_ him. His wrists are cut with the blade of a knife. There’s blood on the floor. He’s balanced unevenly on a bucket, shaking. If only I had pushed him.

“But it’s almost worth it when I tell him that you sent me. He is a Judas, betrayed. The Chesapeake Ripper is a coward and a hypocrite, Mr. Graham. He wants to live. He is a man who does not accept the art that he gives to others. It is selfish of him to believe that he is solely entitled to immortality, to power. It’s selfish of him to think that his professed love, his professed well-meaning, could lead to anything other than your retaliation.

“Do you see? There. There’s your Judas.”

Matthew crouches by the edge of the pool, like a predator about to spring. One of his hands skim over the pool’s surface, leaving water droplets on his fingertips. He brushes his hand across his forehead, just a rapid gesture like he’s wiping sweat off his brow, but it’s almost as if he’s marking himself with holy water. A crude baptism.

“What are you trying to prove, Matthew?” Graham says from the other side of the pool, impassive. “You dragged me out of my house to this place. Is this...advice? An apology? Or are you leaving after all?”

“Right now,” Matthew says, quietly, “your focus is on Hannibal Lecter. What he took from you, and what he took from everyone else. That’s good. You’ll do it: you’ll catch that coward, that hypocrite. Tell me, Mr. Graham. What is my focus?”

He bridges the gap between them, crosses from one end of the pool to the other. They’re only a few feet apart, now.

Graham blinks. “Matthew--”

“Don’t say mimicry,” Matthew says. “Don’t say obsession. I have a focus. It’s _mine_ , but you make it clearer. But what is it?”

This is a focus that isn’t a person. That isn’t Francis Dolarhyde or Will Graham. He wants to know, more than anything.

And Graham laughs. “Who exactly do you think I am, Matthew? Clarity is the last thing I can give you. Clarity is something that ricochets in my mind, that is there and isn’t there. You have to see it yourself. Jack Crawford has had his own lesson in clarity himself and he knows, more than anything, that it’s about a _decision._ It’s about consequences and seeing endgame and being willing to rise. Are you able to see the world like that?”

“Are you?” Matthew says. He’s not the only one who is projecting. Graham has clarity, but it isn’t perfect. It is still being tested, as Matthew’s identity is being tested, even though he’s free of complete submersion.

Silence.

“You know,” Matthew tells Graham, “I like your river. I know it isn’t mine, but I like it.”

“That’s the point,” Graham says, and doesn’t seem unruffled by the subject change. “The river - it’s a place of tranquility. The eye of a storm.”

“And you let me go there with you,” Matthew says, quietly. “Will. Can you trust me?”

He makes a jerky movement, and sits on the floor. Lowers himself downwards as if he’s bowing, kneeling, genuflecting.

The fluorescent blue light from the pool dances at the side of their faces. Matthew wants to push Will Graham into the pool, and dive in himself, and he thinks that he’ll try to make Will smile. He wants to press a chlorine kiss to Will’s mouth and tell him that he’s faithful, he’ll stay. It’s always the water that connects them, drowning and overflowing and swimming. Connection is something to have and to hold onto. It’s inside, below the surface.

“No,” Will says. “My answer hasn’t changed.” Of course; Matthew expects nothing less. But Will lowers himself onto the ground as well, so they are at eye level with each other.

“Are you Catholic, Mr. Graham?”

Will shakes his head. “I’m not anything. My father brought me up Baptist, but I’m not practicing. I’m familiar, though...Dr. Lecter was fond of his Biblical references.”

“I suppose we’re alike, in that respect,” Matthew says, drolly. He says, “I’m the Irish Roman Catholic sort myself. My ma was very observant. Sunday Mass, all of that. I was an altar boy for awhile. You can guess who I’m named after. And I’ve got a memory like yours, so I can recite almost everything.”

Looking mystified, Will asks, “Why are you telling me this?"

“It’s my river,” Matthew says. “The verses, the stories and lyrics of them. When it got bad, once, when a dragon wrecked havoc in my head, I was able to distance myself from him. I remembered a narrative of stories that weren’t the dragon’s. A gospel that named me.”

He had almost forgotten about that. How he was able to retain _Matthew Brown_ , that self, that center. Will’s river has reminded him. Matthew had whispered to himself about how the apostle Peter had started to walk on water when Jesus had stood there. Peter hadn’t sunk, not at first, until he doubted. It was one of his favorite stories from Matthew that he had liked when he was young. It was a story about courage and faith among wind and waves. It wouldn’t be the last time that Peter doubted, but what mattered is, then, it was okay to be afraid for a moment. The storm died down and Peter didn’t drown.

Courage and faith. Matthew isn’t sure if he has the former; he knows that he’s helping assemble the bait to catch Lecter, but doesn’t know what it entails. He knows he doesn’t have the latter, at least not in reciprocation from Will. But it’s a start. It’s a focus of his own.

He tells Will about Peter and the storm and the water, without exactly telling him what it means, but he can see a spark of...recognition? attentiveness? something? in Will’s eyes.

When he’s finished, his hand finds Will’s, a loose hold, and he brings them back to Will’s river. Abigail Hobbs and the boy aren’t here; it’s only them. There’s an ease here, a naturalness. Will had said that he didn’t trust Matthew, but he’s letting Matthew reach out to stabilize him. To stabilize the both of them.

It feels warm. Sunlight and the sound of running water. Will’s dog Winston splashing in the river, getting droplets of water on their clothes, on their faces.

“He’ll scare away the fish,”Will says, the amusement in his voice.

“Let him,” Matthew says, “we don’t have to only fish.”

They have an imaginary picnic at the riverside - Will plays along, murmurs something about Cajun food from New Orleans, Matthew counters with something simpler, fish and chips - and Will laughs softly. Matthew wants to tangle his fingers in Will’s hair again, wants to take that kiss, but he doesn’t.

“A spicy meal,” Matthew says. “It’s a change from Dr. Lecter’s fare, isn’t it? _They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst._ ”

He completes the verse, with a smile, his eyes closed, “ _May the table set before them become a snare; may it become retribution and a trap._ ”

“He would like that quote,” Will says, and Matthew feels Will’s hands twitch against his. He realizes it’s a subtle nudge to change the topic, to bring them back to the river and the picnic.

“New Orleans,” Matthew says, a prompt. “How is it like? Did you catch any serial killers there?”

“I - I don’t want to talk about that,” Will says, quietly.

Matthew knows that Will left the New Orleans police force. His file said that he had been a homicide detective there, but he doesn’t know why Will left. Matthew is curious, but he decides not to prod him. Maybe Will might tell him later.

Instead, Will says, “But there is an old infamous case in New Orleans that you might be interested in. I’ve lectured about it at Quantico.”

With a short laugh, he adds, “I almost _miss_ teaching classes, strangely enough…”

Matthew wonders how it would be like. To have Will Graham as a teacher. He listens, carefully. He had seen Will do this for other subjects beside Hannibal Lecter, listening outside the privacy room as Will consulted to FBI agents, but this is almost like a grim fairy tale, a retelling of a long ago past. There is no urgency.

Will shows Matthew the murderer, his eyes closed, the first-person point-of-view back in place. He lays it out - the scenes and the letter and the jazz music - and they’re both swept out into another landscape, another backdrop. Matthew can see it and hear it.

It feels like closure. Sitting poolside and thinking of a conversation by the riverside. Matthew couldn’t kill Hannibal Lecter here, but he can make his connection anyway.

He’ll find his courage and his focus eventually.

 

* * *

 

They return to Wolf Trap. Will is in the kitchen. Matthew had poked his head inside, saw that Will was making gumbo, and retreated with a half-smile.

He sits on the porch with Will’s dogs, the day’s newspaper in his lap. He squints in the dim porch light, the only light for miles in the darkness of the night. The newspapers make his fingers inky, but he is used to it, and he continues to read on. Miraculously enough, there hasn’t been any leaks from the task force about The Sting (as Ettore De Angelis refers to the operation), and the newspapers are continuing to buzz over Italy. Very predictable of them.

It will get a hell lot more interesting when Freddie Lounds comes into play. _Tear him down_ , Matthew had told her, and she will. She’ll do more than that.

His hands run over the newspapers and he thinks he can see it: Will’s endgame. A room filled with black suits, black ties, black dresses, black shoes, and the pungent scent of flowers wafting. Dr. Hannibal Lecter is there in his Sunday best, in the shadows, while a priest says: _Remember him--before the silver cord is severed, and the gold bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns where it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it._

He doesn’t realize he’s murmuring it out loud to himself until he notices that Will is behind him, the front door ajar. He has this _look_ in his eyes that says he knows what Matthew is seeing.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Will says. Then Will says, “A shattered pitcher. Dr. Lecter would like that. His broken teacup.” He is smiling in that bitter, amused way of his.

“ _Vanity of vanities_ ,” Matthew says, in refutation. “ _All is vanity._ ”

He can’t help reaching his ink-stained palm out to curl around Will’s wrist, fingerprints of black left imprinted, smudged. Will doesn’t recoil. The pendulum is swinging, and he’s sharing Matthew’s vision, he’s smelling the flowers and hearing the recitations.

“It’s not going to be enough,” Will says.

 _Ghosts_ , Matthew thinks. _It’s hard._

He knows that it is. Today is a day of reconciliation, and connection, and revelation. He still has the picture of Francis Dolarhyde in his jacket pocket. He still looks at the moon and remembers how it shone when it was full.

 _Courage_ , he tells himself. And like he’s always been telling himself, in his cages and the cage of his head: _Focus._

 


	9. Chapter 9

Will leaves Matthew with a bowl of gumbo on the porch, returns to the house, and fumbles around for his cellphone. He calls Alana Bloom and tells her about his misgivings. He had looked at the vision, at the future, and Hannibal Lecter hadn’t been there.

This is a scheme that relies on Will Graham going crazy, and Dr. Lecter being reeled in at the closing stage, but the crazy isn’t _quite_ sufficient enough.

“Fabrication of murder,” Alana says. “That’s what drew him, in the past.”

“Not that,” Will says, and can’t keep the acid out of his tone, a pointed reminder at himself. Randall Tier’s death wasn’t necessarily fabricated. It was real.

“I know,” Alana says. “We’re not going to put you in that position again. We can...scale it down. And the victim, in this case, could be somebody that he tried to kill. Somebody that you have conflicting feelings for, that we could spin into something that he could buy. Assault.”

No.

Vehemently, Will says, “ _I would never hurt you._ ”

He says, “He wouldn’t believe it. We can’t expose you to the media like that.”

“And you’re not getting exposed yourself?” Alana says. “ _Please_ , Will. What you’re doing could later get you discredited to high hell on the stand. You’re not going to face the fire alone. I want to do my part. I know that you would never hurt me, but he’s believed you capable of worse things.”

Will rubs a hand on the side of his face. “Alana, you’ll have to lie. You’ll have to take an interview with Freddie Lounds.”

“I can bullshit,” she says, gently. “I’ve done my fair share of interviews. You know that I’ve always consulted on cases. And I had practice with Leonard Brauer, remember?”

Will huffs a laugh; it’s a sad laugh. “ _Alana_.”

“It has to be me,” she says. “The impact wouldn’t be the same, if it was Jack or anybody else. Don’t think you’re the only one who understands Hannibal. I didn’t see him before, but I do now.”

In resignation, Will says, “Okay. Call Jack.”

He leaves his cellphone on the kitchen counter, picks up his own bowl of gumbo. He goes back onto the porch again, and sits beside Matthew, beside the dogs. In the porchlight, the spoon in his hand glistens, and he can see the black inked traces that Matthew’s fingers have left behind on his skin.

“You think you can fix your problem?” Matthew asks.

“I don’t know,” Will says. He doesn’t want to think any more about it. He doesn’t want to speculate what might happen next, what might happen later.

“Hmm,” Matthew says. He says, “Tell me more about that New Orleans serial killer.”

Will is relieved for the distraction.

Inquisitively, Sheila sticks her nose near his bowl. He gently pushes her away, steers her toward Matthew. Matthew, who’s finished eating, readily accepts her into his lap.

Will talks. He hums a song out loud, something that a musician had composed about the killer: a strangely jovial jazz tune.

“You have a piano in your house,” Matthew says. “Do you know how to play it?”

Will shakes his head. “I don’t have the skill for it. It was my father who was musically inclined. He taught me.”

He takes a deep breath, releases it. He realizes that Matthew Brown can read him, can calm him down. It doesn’t need to be a full-fledged mental image. It doesn’t need to be the river. He wonders if he should be scared by this, how much of himself he’s giving, but he knows what Matthew’s ‘river’ is in return. This is not about changing, but sharing and concentrating empathy.

This is the piece that Matthew has given him. Hannibal Lecter was set on changing, on transformation. Will had taken the offered role and tried to use that destroy him and he had failed. But Matthew doesn’t use change as a tool - he uses understanding. Understanding is what leads him to his obsessions. He went for Dr. Lecter even though he soon realized that Will wasn’t the Copycat Killer. He never wanted Will to be an ideal, but only himself.

The foundation of the trap targeting Hannibal Lecter is based not on a forced action, but calculation: destroying somebody with what they already have. With what they have inside of them.

Will knows how effective understanding is. It’s his pendulum, his perception. He’s known this from the very beginning, when he was a homicide detective and when he started to work with the FBI, but somehow he had lost this lesson. There’s been too much darkness, too much blood, too much anger. What he needs is distance. The momentary peace of the river.

When they both return to the house, he feels Matthew’s hand on the small of his back, as if guiding him through the door. _Habit,_ Will thinks, with a jolt. The one orderly in the hospital who initiated touch without his gloves on, who had watched him with keen eyes.

He thinks of that night in the car.

“Why did you choose me?” he says. It’s a non-sequitur. He wants to accompany it with another question, _How do I make you feel like yourself?_ but he isn’t certain. He doesn't know if he wants to say it.

Matthew glances back. He says, “You’re strong, Mr. Graham.”

“Strong,” Will repeats, and turns the word over in his head.

“You have an identity,” Matthew says. “Even if you’re struggling with ghosts, or even if Lecter was getting to you, you held on. You don’t mimic like me; you don’t go as far as I do. You have a similar brand of empathy like me, but…” He shrugs. “You’re a legend in the making.”

In every way, Matthew Brown is still the poet who composed him a gruesome love poem. An admirer. He thinks highly, too highly, of Will, and it makes Will want to let out a despairing laugh. But Will needs him. He needed Matthew in the hospital, somebody who believed him and listened to him, a catalyst for the dark role that he soon took on because of Dr. Lecter. He needs him now, for the river and whatever this is that they have, even though it’s not explicitly trust.

When he sleeps, he doesn’t dream of drowning. He doesn’t walk on water, but he can swim. He treads the waves, waves that don’t toss him to and fro, waves that don’t pull him under. He can see a fish darting through the white foam of the ocean.

 

* * *

 

7:30 P.M.

There’s a break-in reported at Hannibal Lecter’s office. Freddie Lounds breaks the story with great aplomb, pondering whether any so-called ‘murderabilia’ had been stolen and the ethics involved with the whole practice. She keeps with her usual accusatory tone, pointing out that anything taken could have been useful evidence. But she also points out that Hannibal’s office is crawling with security to discourage vandals and curious passerby; she shamelessly admits that she had tried to get into the office herself.

Lounds speculates that the ‘burglar’ was someone from law enforcement who came in, but whose presence wasn’t official, and they got in hot water for it. (She bolsters this claim by saying that she has an anonymous source in the task force.)

Other news outlets pick up the story from Lounds. Most skirt around the allegations Lounds made about a law enforcement officer, targeting the murderabilia angle instead, but several papers do quote her, seeing as she _has_ become more famous because of the Chesapeake Ripper case so perhaps she does have authority on the subject.

The task force commander Joseph Ballard goes on record saying that nothing was taken, that it was just a misunderstanding. When Lounds hounds him at a televised press conference about the rumor of a law enforcement officer being the trespasser, he tells her, “No comment.”

It’s a very creative touch to Matthew’s scheme. Will questions Lounds about the murderabilia section, which seems like an unrelated ramble to the underlying implication in the article. She just smiles and says, “You told me to layer it, Graham. There’s a layer.”

Make Muhammad come to the mountain. Make Hannibal Lecter read between the lines.

 

* * *

 

They have to wait until they make the next move; they have to let Lounds’ article sink in. A week goes by, another week of Will scrutinizing his map and double-checking dubious sightings. He’s reassured, for now, that Alana won’t be in the spotlight, at least not yet, but he still finds himself feeling as if he’s on edge at times.

It becomes a routine, by now, having Matthew Brown in his house. When they don’t come in to Baltimore, Will flips through task force reports while Matthew peers over his shoulder. Matthew doesn’t cause any disruptions. He’s just silent, considering, and Will gets used to the warmth of Matthew’s breath on the back of his neck, the way his hands flutter forward to turn a page over for Will.

The first time that the dogs try and lobby for Will’s attention, Matthew grins, but leads them outside. Will catches glimpses of them through the window, rolling around in the grass like tumbleweeds. When Matthew pulls himself up, he has strands of dried grass in his hair and on the back of his shirt. He’s beaming at the dogs, and he suddenly lurches forward to half-tackle Winston.

Matthew Brown has somewhat of an affinity with animals. Will knows he shouldn’t be taken aback, Matthew is not the only one, after all. There is Peter Bernardone, who had showed him a rat through his jumpsuit; there is even Hannibal Lecter, who had taken care of Will’s dogs. There’s Will Graham...

When Matthew comes back inside, he notices that Will had stopped to watch him by the window. He says wryly, “We can’t all be perfect models of the Macdonald Triad, Mr. Graham. Although my dragon was.”

He _does_ have an identity of his own, Will thinks. But sometimes he can’t stop making comparisons. He can’t stop making murder as an integral part of his identity. This what makes him dangerous, volatile, and this is the reason why Will cannot trust him. For Matthew, dissociation cannot get enforced by the stream of the river. Matthew has his own mechanism, but it isn’t reliable, it’s not a foolproof failsafe.

It’s almost easy to forget this when Matthew gives Will a sideways smile, the wisps of grass still in his hair.

It’s almost easy to forget this when Matthew takes his turn in the kitchen. He doesn’t make elaborate affairs of meals like Lecter, but simplistic straightforward things that point to his origins just like Will’s occasional Southern dishes. Matthew makes clam chowder, which he attributes to his mother in a passing acknowledgement. Biscuits and gravy. A bread filled with grapes and raisins called barmbrack. And even with his previous remark about Will being the expert fisherman from the South, Matthew _does_ know how to cook fish - he used to live near a harbor, after all.

It’s almost easy to forget this whenever Matthew engages him in easy conversation. He’s knowledgeable enough to hold his own when it comes to the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force work, and he seems to have realized that directing Will to pseudo-lecture him is soothing and stimulating for them both, despite the gory topics they touch on. Matthew lectures back, sometimes. He has an encyclopedic familiarity with gruesome crimes that Will suspects is a result of reading and glorifying and romanticizing - he’s probably a regular TattleCrime reader.

There’s a smooth rhythm to the conversations that marks it differently from Will’s previous classroom talks. There’s not a multitude of staring eyes or questions or overly earnest applause.

Their lectures aren’t just lectures. Personal details slip through. Will eventually admits that he lost his badge in New Orleans for his reluctance to fire his gun. Matthew continues to sporadically allude to his mother, and then he talks of a time when he tried to copy his dragon even though his mentor had left him. Matthew had wandered from state to state, and he still remembers every city and town he has been.

“He doesn’t have an anchor point,” Will says. “He’s itinerant. Migratory. Like one of the birds you spoke about.”

“He’s no bird,” Matthew says, and his eyes are cold. “Birds flock together, remember? Even if they’re seemingly solitary. He’s a lone dragon.”

Will says, “You thought you were a lone dragon, too.”

“It sounds like a tough conundrum,” Matthew says, a muted murmur. “Am I the sea, or the sea monster, that was set to guard you?”

Will notices the word choice, _guard._ It’s Matthew’s habit, again. The orderly outside his cell.

And Will’s mind jumps to his dream - the ocean, the fish - and before he can stop himself, before he can remind himself of Matthew’s volatility, he thinks: _You are the sea._

He has had visions and dreams of inundation, but this is different. He’s kept afloat.

 

* * *

 

It’s nightfall when there is a knock on the door. When Will hears the rhythm, he knows that it’s not his FBI guards, it’s not Jack, it’s not Alana.

It’s Miriam Lass, whose voice is breathless, her face flushed. She is carrying a small package. She is accompanied by Ardelia Mapp, who immediately offers Will a pair of latex gloves. He observes that Miriam and Mapp are wearing their own pairs of gloves.

“It’s my birthday today,” Miriam says. “I just got this in the mail. I thought you would like a look with us, before we hand it over to forensics. We have a right to see this before anyone else.”

Will discerns a label on top of the package, and the handwriting inscribed on it. “I see,” he says. “Happy birthday, Miriam.”

He lets them in.

“I know this isn’t exactly protocol,” Mapp says, in an undertone, to Will. “But I think it’ll be okay. I borrowed a friend’s K-9 dog, and she didn’t detect anything. And I’m here, in case he sent anything psychologically triggering - Mia’s been doing well in therapy lately. I’m ready to call Agent Crawford if anything goes amiss.”

Will nods.

Matthew has been watching and listening, sitting at his usual couch. When Miriam turns to Will to ask about his presence, Will says, “He’s staying.”

Miriam is not the only one who might need back-up when it comes to psychological triggers. Will takes off one of his gloves, tosses it over to Matthew, which he catches.

Miriam and Mapp settle down in Will’s living room, the room half-dark, the only light from a single lamp. Will hears Matthew breathe his name: _Mr. Graham_. Matthew seems to relegate himself to the near darkness just as he was in the hospital. The orderly by the door, by the corner. It makes him almost invisible.

Rocky creeps forward to sniff Miriam Lass curiously, his nose at the crook of her prosthetic arm. She doesn’t seem to mind, letting Rocky continue to sniff upward toward her shoulder. She says, noting the other dogs in the room, “You’re the opposite of a crazy cat lady, Graham. Crazy dog man.”

 _Crazy_ isn’t a pejorative here. It’s more of a rapport, a commonality between them instead. Will smiles, and says, “I wouldn’t say exactly that. The opposite would be a sane dog man.”

Miriam smiles back at Will. She had looked agitated earlier, but she appears better, pacified, with Rocky.

“He might have been a service dog,” Will tells her, watching as Rocky puts gentle pressure against Miriam’s lap. It’s something he has done with Will before. Some days Will wonders if he’s a psychiatric service dog, and how he compares to Rocky’s previous owners. He probably was very close to a female owner, though, and it shows in how he nuzzles Miriam.

“He’s different from the bureau’s dogs,” Miriam says. “No bomb-sniffing, drug-sniffing, cadaver-sniffing from you, yeah?”

Mapp rolls her eyes at Miriam affectionately, and takes the package from her. She cuts it open with a pen knife, careful to leave the tape mostly intact. She takes an evidence bag out of her pocket to catch any of its remains.

“Card,” she says, holding a piece of paper up. “And there’s another box. Velvet. The kind you put jewelry in.”

Miriam freezes. “Oh. It’s…”

_She told me it was a beautiful little ring. Silver, set with emeralds. It had both of our initials carved on the inside._

Mapp opens the box. It’s just as she described it to Will, a green stone catching the light. “M.L-A.M.,” she says out loud, turning it over in her gloved hands. “Mia. It was real.”

“Or he just had it made to fuck with us,” Miriam says. She quivers, and says, “Some birthday present, giving a gift that’s intended for someone else. A gift that was supposed to be given a long time ago.”

Will knows all too well Hannibal Lecter’s idea of gifts. Transparency and truth and trust: those winding conversations of murder and beauty, coaxing him to embrace things he could be capable of, things he could learn to savor.

“The card,” Will says, his voice tight, almost trapped in his throat. “Read the card, Mapp.”

Mapp puts the ring on Miriam’s latex-clad palm. Then she reads, and Will hears it in Dr. Lecter’s voice, the cadence and syntax and timbre, as clear as a clarion call:

“I wish you a very happy birthday, Agent Lass. We celebrated two years of your birthdays together, and I feel it is remiss of me to not spend a third, even if in epistle and spirit.

“Here is the gift that I promised you. In the past, I could not have it sent to your friend due to certain impracticalities, but I hope this is apology enough. Agent Mapp, if you are reading this, I assure you that I meant no impoliteness. It was a merely a delay.

“Are you familiar with the symbolism of the emerald, Miriam? The Greeks associated emeralds with their goddess of love Aphrodite, making this a fitting gift for Agent Mapp.

“And the Incas believed that a large emerald, the size of an ostrich egg, was the goddess Umina. However, Spanish conquistadors invaded: they raided the goddess’ temple and took smaller emeralds. But they couldn’t find the emerald queen herself.

“I suppose, in this case, that they did find you.

“Happy Birthday, Miriam. I would have sent you flowers as well, but that is another unfortunate impracticality. Give your Ardelia Mapp my greetings. Tell Will Graham that I, too, am sorry that we have missed yet another constant in life, yet another appointment. But he knows as well as I that it was because of a rejected gift on his part.”

“Jesus,” Mapp says, when she finishes, disgust twisted on her face. She moves over to Miriam, letting her see the card for herself, but Will’s attention is too caught up in the words to overhear their conversation.

 _Hannibal,_ Will thinks, and feels the weight of the name sink against him. He sees Hannibal’s signature on the card and is hit by the old rush of familiarity. Poetry and metaphor and references interwoven into a pattern. The grandness and the civility. The hint of shadows underneath.

_I gave you a rare gift. But you didn’t want it._

He is back at Lecter’s house. Staggering to the ground with the knife in his gut. Blood everywhere, but that doesn’t _matter_ , because Abigail is bleeding worse than him, red gushing from her throat. Dr. Lecter didn’t say a word about Abigail in his letter; he didn’t say a word about what he did to Alana and Jack. Instead he revels in Miriam Lass’ anguish, an anguish he had inflicted and cultivated. Instead he leaves a message for Will, whom he had thought had been his chosen.

But Will bears his teeth, and thinks savagely, _He believed it. Freddie Lounds wove her web and spun her story in the right contorted angles._

Then: the drift of fingers at the side of his face. Curling over his cheek.

“He bought it,” Matthew says. Reaching upward, he tips his forehead against Will’s, and smiles. “Do you need me to get in your head, Mr. Graham?”

He seems to move against Will in the shadowy room, holding them at a precipice, at a standstill. A hand pressed on Will’s chest as if he’s monitoring his heartbeat.

His sea.

“I’m fine,” Will says. The palm against his chest, the warmth of skin on his forehead. But Will also has the thrill of vindication to reinforce him. He wants to tell Alana and Jack how Hannibal’s communication is more than just a warped birthday present.

He disentangles himself from Matthew, and sees Miriam Lass examining the emerald ring.

“I would throw it in a river, if I could,” Mapp says.

“Destroying evidence, Ardelia?” Miriam says. “And I thought that you would wisen up, seeing as you’re the one who’s graduated the academy.”

“Mia,” she says, her brow quirked, “I want to. The deepest river I could find. Maybe one that leads to the ocean. But you’re right, maybe it’s not a good idea. He touched that thing. Water pollution. The fishes and seagulls would choke.”

Miriam Lass laughs until she cries. Will looks at her, looks away - he _knows_ \- and he clicks his tongue at Rocky to come to him, so that Mapp has space to fold her arms around Mapp, an embrace.

When she’s done, Will says, “Thank you. For letting me see this with you.”

“You know how it is, Graham,” Miriam says. “Both of us are parts of his design _._ I _was_ found, but only because he wanted me to be. Sometimes I still don’t feel like I’ve been found. That I’m still...there.” She flexes her arm, winces. The remaining sensations of a phantom limb.

“I’m there,” Will says. “He’s there. In the maze of my head. If I take a wrong turn, he’s waiting for me.”

“Is there any way to get out?” Miriam asks, quietly.

He has been through mazes, as a boy. Farmers cutting designs and pathways across swathes of corn. His father would take him, and he would wait for him at the end.

“Follow the walls,” Will says, with a flicker of a smile, and he knows that it’s a non-answer more than anything.

Maybe it means that the memories are important. You can’t get rid of the pathways. You have to weather it out. It’s how he used to solve mazes. He had mapped them out by staying to the right side, counting each corridor. And then he had gotten out.

He is still in this one.

Then he thinks: Miriam Lass doesn’t have all the corridors, all the memories. You can’t follow the walls in an unconnected maze. But he looks at her: how she endures the phantom pain with a myoelectric extension of herself, how she clenches a fist over the emerald ring. She can rebuild her own crumbled walls.

Maybe that’s what Will has to do. He had torn himself down, and built up a facade that feels too real. He has to rebuild himself from the rubble.

 

* * *

 

Alana Bloom walks with a slight limp, but it’s almost unnoticeable. Now she wears a bandage on her neck, which Freddie Lounds captures with a snap of light, and Alana turns a scowl toward the camera.

Will looks at the picture on the laptop screen. Alana is sitting beside him with a cup of coffee that she had just made in his kitchen, nursing it in her hands. Applesauce is curled at her feet under the table.

Will’s eyes follows the rise of the coffee cup’s steam, distracted for a second, but return to read the article. She is reading, too, even though her supposedly unscheduled interview with Lounds only took place this afternoon.

They had decided to strike soon, two days after Hannibal’s package and his card. Jack said that the effect would make sense that way, and Will had found himself agreeing.

Alana had put together the script herself, letting Jack and Will glance over it. It’s not a perfectly synchronized interview with Lounds - it needs to have an element of spontaneity to make it realistic - but they’ve told Lounds the essential questions she has to ask.

She puts a more callous edge to her questions, caustic and unsympathetic. Freddie Lounds’ own school of journalism. The familiarity of it almost makes Will smile. And Alana answers her. Professional, collected, and with enough honesty that makes the article genuine. Bittersweet.

> EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ALANA BLOOM, HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL’S FORMER PROTEGE AND ALLEGED PARAMOUR
> 
> _By Freddie Lounds_
> 
> This afternoon, TattleCrime encountered Dr. Alana Bloom leaving the offices of the Chesapeake Ripper Task Force. Bloom is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Psychiatry as well as a consultant profiler. In an ironic twist, she’s become involved in one of the biggest cases of the century - with the culprit being none other than her ex-teacher, ex-friend, and well, purported ‘ex.’
> 
> To read more about the Chesapeake Ripper, please see read this page for TattleCrime articles and this page for interviews. TattleCrime has covered the Chesapeake Ripper case since the very beginning, serving not only as a witness and chronicler for the public, but also as an eyewitness.
> 
> Bloom was nearly a victim of Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself, but survives to assist the task force as a profiler.
> 
> Bloom initially refused to engage with TattleCrime as well as any other outlets, but once confronted with other articles that mentioned her, agreed to do an interview to correct any misconceptions. She does not seemed very pleased with the attention while she sits down with me at the brick-composed planters outside the task force building, yet she answers without any uneasiness.
> 
> **TattleCrime:** Dr. Bloom, I’m going to go ahead and ask the question that the world has been itching to say. They’ve used it for a variety of others - for the FBI, for Dr. Lecter’s dinner guests, for his patients. You’ve got a PhD in psychiatry; you’re said to have been very close to him. How could you not know?
> 
> **Bloom:** Nobody knew for a long time. We should have seen it, but we didn’t. He was good at what he did. You’re a reporter. You know the cases. Many of them aren’t obvious. They don’t give themselves away. They cover their tracks. Trust me when I say that I wanted to know, even if it seemed unbelievable, unreal. When I did...it was too late. I wanted to know and I should have known. I was on the task force years earlier, and I would have stopped him then if I could.
> 
> **TattleCrime:** Do you think you were blinded by your relationship with Dr. Lecter?
> 
> **Bloom:** This is hardly professional, Lounds, and I don’t see how it’s relevant. [She pauses.] He was my mentor. But relationships don’t matter to him, when it comes to himself. You’ve mentioned Abigail Hobbs yourself numerous times.
> 
> (Abigail Hobbs is the daughter of Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the Minnesota Shrike. Lecter reportedly grew close to her after having helped save her life, but she ended up becoming his last known victim.)
> 
> **TattleCrime:** Abigail. He kidnapped her, Dr. Bloom, making it appear as if she was dead until he finally killed her for real.
> 
> **Bloom:** Yes. It had never crossed our minds that he had her. He hid it even from Will [Graham].
> 
> (Will Graham is another consultant profiler, who has worked closely for the FBI. See the entries under here for more information.)
> 
> **TattleCrime:** Will Graham suspected that Lecter was the Chesapeake Ripper for quite awhile, however. Did he share his suspicions with you?
> 
> **Bloom:** He never told me outright. In retrospect...it was almost ingenious of Lecter. Will was my friend - is my friend, now - but at the time, we were uneasy with each other. Lecter had framed him as the so-called ‘Copycat Killer’, which of course, was just a front for himself. I thought Will was unstable. Paranoid. Jack thought the same, too, until he realized, and the confrontation at Lecter’s house was...chaos. It shouldn’t have happened that way with Abigail Hobbs. Lounds, it shouldn’t have even happened that way with you - how he would’ve killed you if it wasn’t for the FBI’s intervention. We know now that his car was spotted outside your hotel room. I know what it’s like to have to be in federal protection. It’s not one of the most comforting situations.
> 
> **TattleCrime:** That’s...considerate of you, Dr. Bloom, thank you. But you came out of that house near death, didn’t you? You’re limping. And what’s that, I don’t think I recognize--? [I gesture at what looks to be a fresh bandage on Bloom’s neck.]
> 
> **Bloom** : [She laughs.] You don’t recognize it from my medical records, is that right? Or from my grand jury testimony?
> 
> **TattleCrime:** You know very well that grand jury testimonies are confidential, Dr. Bloom.
> 
> **Bloom:** It’s from my dog Applesauce. She’s a bit untrained, that’s all.
> 
> **TattleCrime:** Dr. Bloom, I’ve seen detractors attempting to blame you for Dr. Lecter’s actions, pointing to your credentials and alleged relationship. If this is an attack from--
> 
> **Bloom:** [Interrupts.] People react. If it hurts. If they’re unstable, left in the wake of a tragedy, and they’re not themselves. But it’s nothing, Lounds; there’s nothing in whatever you’re implying. I’m taking Applesauce to a dog trainer. And yes, I nearly died. So did Jack. So did Will. He killed all of us, but we’re doing our best to catch him along with the task force.
> 
> Leave my relationship with Hannibal out of the headline, Lounds. Tell your readers to keep a lookout in Italy. Or France, maybe. Lithuania. Japan. Any of the hotspots that our press reports have told the public. We don’t want there to be any more victims, and we want to get him for those that it’s been too late for.
> 
> Thanks for the interview. I appreciate it.
> 
> [Alana Bloom stands up and leaves, her bag swinging over her shoulder as she makes her way to the parking lot. It’s seems as if she’s rather upset with me...]

Will takes off his glasses when he’s done reading.

Alana, finished reading before Will, blows at her coffee mug, She blinks as the clouds drifts toward her eyelashes. “How did I do?”

“You know,” Will says, and he feels his head fall to her shoulder, “I would never hurt you.”

She doesn’t pull away from the contact; her head nudges back at him. She snorts, “I know, Will.”

They’re both silent. Matthew is asleep on the couch, a room away, and the dogs are with him. The house seems very quiet, very still.

Alana mutters, “I can’t believe she still did the headline. And that she somehow got into my medical records. That woman is one of the most unscrupulous, unethical reporters in her profession. It’s astonishing that she’s not drowning in lawsuits.”

“And yet you still commiserated with her about her going into hiding,” Will mutters back, with a smile.

Alana shrugs. “She has a girlfriend. And even with all the hot water she’s been in before - counting that encounter with Abel Gideon - this has probably been the worst of it. I think Abigail made quite the impression on her.”

She says, “We’re going to go public with the package that he sent to Miriam Lass tomorrow. To see if there’s any jewelers who might remember him. I think she was correct in thinking that he only had that ring made recently, maybe somewhere overseas.”

Then she says, “I wish he had said something to me in that letter. Even if it was a taunt.”

“There’s so many things that I wanted him to write,” Will says. “But he won’t apologize, or explain, or justify, or rationalize. It’s not...him. We’ll catch him.”

“We’ll catch him,” she agrees.

Another stretch of silence. Alana sips her coffee, closes the laptop for Will.

Alana says, “You’re still upset that I had to blame Applesauce. Sorry.”

“S’okay,” Will says sleepily, against her shoulder. He’s nearly drowsing right there. Today he had been working with the task force again and forcing his mind to go over Hannibal’s package, over and over again. The intent and the emotions. Continuing to have discussions with Miriam Lass about her memories of the emerald ring.

“You’re usually not so overtly tactile,” Alana says, softly. “Matthew Brown?”

“Don’t study me, Alana,” Will says with a sigh, but something in him is startled by the idea. He didn’t realize. “Dr. Lecter’s gone. I was copycatting him. Maybe it’s - wearing off, so to speak.”

( _Myself._ )

Matthew’s forehead on his. His hand on Will’s chest. A routine of the dogs and the smell of Matthew frying fish and that one objective burned into his mind that is coming close: _finish this, catch him._

Alana has been starting to frequently come over with Applesauce, so that her dog can play with Will’s and she can help Will sort through task force files. Ardelia Mapp has invited Will to come over to her Baltimore apartment near the task force headquarters for tea. Miriam Lass often stays with Mapp when she’s not in Virginia for her therapy sessions. And even though reminiscent of past dinners, dinners elsewhere, Jack Crawford sometimes accompanies Will home from the task force, with the excuse of checking up on Matthew Brown, and has apparently decided that he likes eating the fish that Will has caught.

It feels normal, even though Will has always been used to being alone. Maybe this is Will Graham, rebuilding.

Before Alana leaves, Will tells her, “Alana - the interview. You were phenomenal.” He means it. She has reconstructing of her own to do, her own challenges to go up against; they all do, for this crime of the century.

_He killed all of us._

“Aren’t I always?” she says, and a smile crinkles her face: her eyes, her mouth, her forehead. “See you tomorrow, Will.”


	10. Chapter 10

Matthew wakes from a dream, thinking that dragon fire is burning his neck.

 

* * *

 

Ardelia Mapp calls her tea ‘Smart People’s Tea.’ Matthew sips it dubiously, tastes honey and lemon, and discovers that it’s surprisingly palatable. In the background, Mapp’s ipod playing in the background, an upbeat song: _For once in my life, I won’t let sorrow hurt me…_

Will is talking to Miriam Lass on the balcony of the apartment. Even through the half-open screen door, Matthew can hear the usual levity in his voice. Will is probably doing what he does best. Walking through memories and comparing. The name _Hannibal Lecter_ between them.

The sound of music cuts off, and Matthew looks up. Mapp has paused the song, cradling her own cup of tea in her hands, and she says, “So. What's your story, Matthew Brown? You’re not one of _us_ , after all. More like one of _them._ ”

“Not a fed, not with any law enforcement, no,” Matthew says. “And I suppose you can say that. I was acquitted.”

Mapp shrugs. “So you walk, and of all things, you’re hanging out with Graham. With the task force.”

“I have unfinished business with Dr. Lecter,” Matthew says. And he had made an unspoken promise to Will Graham at the Baltimore Hospital for Criminally Insane, leaning toward Will in his cell to pick up his whispered words.

“Don’t we all,” Mapp says. She takes a seat beside Matthew on the plush yellow sofa, edging a cushion away to make room for herself.

Matthew glances over at her, notices her hands. “The task force isn’t letting you keep the ring, are they?” The news of Lecter’s package has finally been released to the press.

“Of course not. Evidence,” she says. “It’s not like I wanted it, though.”

“A souvenir, maybe,” Matthew says, and a smile darts at the corners of his mouth. “Adornment. Your Mia Lass gets an arm and you get a ring.”

“You...are an insensitive little shit,” Mapp says, glaring. “I guess De Angelis wasn’t wrong when he was grumbling about you. You’re _nuts._ ”

“To be fair,” Matthew says, “Mr. Graham doesn’t think that I am.”

“Right,” she says, with an eyeroll. “And by the way, Brown, I’m the only one who calls her Mia.”

“Miriam is a good enough name by itself,” he acknowledges. “The Biblical Miriam. Aaron and Moses’ sister. Once, she began speaking against God, and he cursed her with leprosy. Her brothers begged God to heal her; Aaron said: _Let her not be as one dead, whose flesh is half-eaten away_. But God refused. He had her confined for seven days until she eventually was released.”

He hears Mapp catch her breath.

She says, “That was a hell lot longer than seven days.” A snarl is tangled into the words, but it’s more like a lament.

“Yes,” Matthew says, soft. “But y’know, it was Miriam who led the Israelites across the Red Sea. She was called a prophet. She sang and she danced, playing a timbrel as the sea parted. It’s not all that bad.”

“That was a surprising twist,” she says. “I think I heard something like support in there. Unless I’m hearing things.”

“We’re all in the same boat, Mapp,” he says. “I’m not like Will. Not exactly. But I do want to catch him as much as you do.”

Mapp reclines backward on the sofa, taps a foot on the floor. Matthew recognizes it as the same rhythm as the song that had been playing. “Do you really, Brown? I’ve been chasing that asshole for nearly two years. And there’s people who have been after him for a little bit longer than that. I’ve been living this every goddamned day. We found _shit_ on the Ripper for a long, long time. And then Mia’s arm turned up."

She says, “Jack Crawford had to pull some strings to get me assigned to the task force. He knew that I was close to Mia. He - he gave up looking before I did. But we’re in the same boat in a way, too. We never told her that we stopped. I thought she was dead and I just wanted _revenge._ The Ripper had the audacity to take a federal fucking agent, my best girl.”

Her foot stops tapping out the rhythm and she says, “I still do want revenge.”

“It’s the best motivator,” Matthew says.

 _Retribution._ He thinks of Dolarhyde’s dragonish apparition, of being possessed and abandoned. He knows how fury feels, when it’s dampened and pushed underneath everything else. He wants this ghost to go away, and it will take more than a letter in to vanquish it. He knows that the dragon has no right to hunt any more. It is savage and it is weak. It compares nothing to the Bible verse that it was inspired from and it glorifies, and it compares nothing to the steel determination in Will Graham’s eyes. He’s been fucking tormented for too long.

Unfinished business. Maybe it’s not just Will Graham he’s projecting on.

“I’m glad we’re in agreement about that,” Mapp says, wearing a shade of a smile. “Ettore De Angelis told me that you were the one who kickstarted the plan to catch Lecter, so there’s another point in your favor. But then, you’re quite the blasphemer. Hannibal the Cannibal as an analogue for God. My Nana would be having conniptions if she heard you.”

“You can tell Miriam Lass about parting the Red Sea,” Matthew says. “I think she’d like that.”

He pauses, and adds, “I like your tea.”

“My Nana’s tea, actually.”

“Well,” Matthew says, “let’s make a Smart People’s toast to vengeance.”

Mapp shrugs, and says, “I can drink to that.”

Matthew reaches forward to clink their glasses together.

Somehow, next, he finds himself off on a tangent about poetry with Ardelia Mapp. It isn’t a subject he particularly enjoys, but he know too much about William Blake to not contribute: _Dost thou know who made thee / Little Lamb I’ll tell thee / Little Lamb I’ll tell thee! / He is called by thy name / For he calls himself a Lamb._

Matthew points out that it doesn’t precisely rhyme.

Will and Miriam walk back inside the apartment as Mapp starts to explain slant rhymes.

 

* * *

 

Ettore De Angelis’ chatty secretary lets it slip to Matthew that De Angelis is fond of the prayer garden at the Baltimore Basilica. He goes there often in the week to catch the afternoon mass by himself, even though he already goes on Sundays with his family.

(“Yeah, he has a family,” the secretary says. “But he doesn’t have any pictures up his office because he thinks it’s bad luck.”)

A prayer garden. How quaint.

But it would be a detour from spending time in the task force headquarters, watching as Will, Dr. Bloom, and Agent Crawford alternate between studying potential updates about Lecter, discussing their plan, and having tension-filled debates. It almost gives Matthew a headache listening to them; their dogged persistence and occasional despondency is overwhelming. Back and forth conversations about the nature of Lecter’s psych, the possible team that could make the arrest while unobtrusively lying in wait: plainclothes local police? FBI? SWAT?...

It’s very loud to him, considering that he is used to being locked up in a cell. Matthew would prefer to be back at Will’s house, reading files together, but he knows that they are gearing up for their next moves, the big ones that will determine everything.

He feels useless in the larger scheme of things, yet he realizes that it is par for the course. This is not Matthew Brown’s legend, just as it wasn’t his when he followed Francis Dolarhyde. He tells himself that he is content to watch, to be there to catch Will if he falls.

Right now, however, he wants to see Ettore De Angelis.

The prayer garden at the basilica is shaped in the form of a fish. It is a tranquil oasis in downtown Baltimore, bright with flowers and a painted mural. The flowers painted on the mural are the kinds that Matthew’s mother had loved because of their associations with Mary: roses, lilies, lilies of the valley, and marigolds.

Ettore De Angelis is sitting at a side wall with his head bowed, his hands in his lap.

Matthew approaches him and greets him with, “Keeping watch for the hour, De Angelis. Is this your Gethsemane?”

His voice is hushed, even though there isn’t anyone else in the garden since mass has started in the basilica. Matthew has his manners.

De Angelis doesn’t look up.

“Matthew 26:40,” De Angelis says. “That verse is used more for the observance of a Holy Hour. Eucharistic adoration. There’s a chapel inside for that, in fact. And I hope to God this isn’t my Gethsemane, Brown: _Here comes my betrayer_ , indeed.”

Then he looks up. “I went to seminary school for a period of time. I switched careers."

“So you did,” Matthew says. He notes how at place De Angelis looks among the flowers and the greenery, and he remembers the firm ease that De Angelis displayed when he had quoted the Bible during their earlier meeting. He offers, “I used to be an altar server. My ma was very religious.”

“Why did you follow me?” De Angelis asks. It’s puzzlement, not irritation. He doesn’t seem scared by Matthew, but maybe it is because of where they are. Holy ground, hallowed ground. A pope was here, once, and there is a statue of him in the garden.

“I wasn’t stalking you. Your secretary told me where you were.”

“Of course he did,” De Angelis says, with an exasperated noise. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

Matthew isn’t exactly sure why he had come to Ettore De Angelis. Matthew turns concepts over in his head - penance and faith and courage and revenge and focus, always focus - and knows that if he wanted to, he could have always tried confession again, tried reconciliation, inside the church with a priest. But that hadn’t worked out too well last time.

He looks at the mural. His mother’s favorite flowers.

“Justice,” Matthew says. “What does it mean?”

It is something that he wasn’t brought to, for killing Andy Sykes. It is something that De Angelis is gunning for Hannibal Lecter to face.

And maybe it’s revenge, too. Maybe it’s reclamation of self, as Will had tried to do when he sent Matthew to Lecter, trying to invoke a punishment for what Lecter has done and what Lecter has made him.

Is this where identity lies? Is it the place where he had taken Will’s hands and asked him what he saw? Where plans are made and there’s a chase. When you’re using what they’ve given you against them. Maybe it’s a time when the full moon will no longer wrench at him and that dragon will stop taking.

“Justice entirely depends on how you interpret it,” De Angelis says. His eyes are keen, and he pins Matthew with his gaze. “There’s a view somewhere that justice is revenge. An eye for an eye. I can assure you, Brown, that there are several incensed relatives of Dr. Lecter’s victims who want nothing more than that. I’ve met a troubled young woman who once told me that she had fantasies of disemboweling and eviscerating the Ripper, as he had done to her brother.

“It’s not my place to dismiss her fantasies. She has the right to think that, although I’m perfectly aware that it falls under vigilantism and I wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute her. Yet even though there’s a slim chance of her vision coming to pass, it can be classified as a kind of justice. But there are other kinds of justice, too. It’s where I am, Brown. Where the task force is."

It’s close to the speech he gave that last time. _The authority of a defendant's fate lies at the hands of the court._ This almost-priest as a de facto priest.

“This isn’t about the Ripper,” Matthew says. His hands close around each other, as if in prayer.

“It doesn’t have to be,” De Angelis says. “But you wanted to hear something from me, didn’t you?” He tilts his head.

Matthew notices the rosary beads in De Angelis’ fists, strands of silver and red. He wonders where De Angelis had began, where he had stopped. Maybe he is praying by days. Today is Tuesday, the Sorrowful Mysteries. _The Agony in the Garden_ , he thinks, and he remembers his mother’s rosary, wooden beads spooling at her fingertips. He had left it on her grave.

For the first time, he asks himself how she would think of him, how he is and how he becomes. She had always offered him prayers, psalms, hymns, in advice and in comfort. She would tell him all the Bible stories without censor, without warning: _You’ll need these stories, Matthew._

He remembers his mother touching his face and telling him to not be afraid. He remembers the reading of Job being told about the Leviathan, a ferocious creature of the sea: _Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie its tongue with a rope?_

“Matthew,” De Angelis says, and he sounds surprisingly gentle, as if he’s read the thoughts from Matthew’s face, “those who speak for monsters can speak for justice. For all my doubts, for all my misgivings - look at Will Graham.”

“He who fights monsters,” Matthew says, simply, in rebuttal. Because he of all people knows Will’s state of mind, the turmoil and the strife.

“Who said anything about fighting?”

Disbelievingly, Matthew says, “What he’s doing - what you’re doing, what your task force is doing - it’s not fighting?”

“It’s not fighting in a certain sense of the word,” De Angelis says. “Speaking. Representing. Searching. Examining. Collaborating. Snaring.”

“Praying,” Matthew says. He indicates the rosary and the garden. He realizes he knows, now, what Ardelia Mapp meant when she said _revenge._

“That, too,” De Angelis says. “There’s no abyss-gazing here, Brown.”

Hannibal Lecter, after all, cannot be definitively caught by Will Graham’s attempt at mimicry. He cannot be struck down by a blunt and brutal force. It is Matthew’s own plan in play, and he realizes with a lurch that it’s what he should have been thinking of since the very beginning.

 _It was in you_ , he had told Will. But it was always in Matthew Brown all along.

Matthew smiles. This isn’t Gethsemane. He says, “I won’t betray you, Ettore.”

He asks Ettore De Angelis if he can pray with him.

 

* * *

 

Midnight finds Matthew Brown and Will Graham on the porch with the dogs. Neither of them can sleep. Matthew is still musing over his conversation with Ettore De Angelis in the garden. And Will is understandably tense, edgy, with ‘The Sting’ bowling on ahead at the speed of light.

A psychiatric evaluation was ‘somehow’ leaked to TattleCrime. Will Graham has been declared mentally unfit to continue working with the task force. PTSD and a behavioral disorder. Inclined to dissociation and violent behavior. The psychologist recommends that Mr. Graham should stay away from the topic of serial murder, stay away from the chase after Hannibal Lecter.

There will be no official announcements made, but Will will not be going to the task force headquarters tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. It will be a rather conspicuous absence; Baltimore is now off-limits for Will for appearances. He had left Rocky with Ardelia Mapp yesterday, because he had apparently taken quite a shine to Miriam Lass.

Ettore De Angelis had left out two verbs in his pseudo-sermon: _Waiting_ and _hoping._ Matthew can feel how Will is coiled, like a spring. Ready to leap and ricochet. Will had grimaced at the ‘diagnosis’ that Dr. Bloom had drafted and had rubber-stamped with a fake name.

“Still don’t like anyone being called crazy,” Matthew murmurs, and he nudges the blanket that he had brought with him toward Will, so that it’s draped across both of their laps.

Will hears him, and says, “No,” in a huffed breath.

Matthew laughs. “Mr. Graham, do you remember what I told you at the hospital, when you came to me? I thought this was entirely about keeping you sane.”

Will inclines his head. “But to the eyes of the world, it’s the opposite that’s happening.”

“It’s more than the irony,” Matthew says. He says, “Thank you.”

“Is this about what you said earlier?” Will asks, quietly. “When you said that I make you feel like yourself?”

“No,” Matthew says, because it isn’t the same as his revelation in the garden. “It’s not-- it doesn’t matter right now. You’ve got Hannibal Lecter on a hook, Will. Reel him in.”

He considers reaching for Will’s hand. And he does. Underneath the soft folds of the blanket, he finds Will’s fingers. He looks at the slim crescent of the moon in the sky, a sliver of white.

Matthew runs his thumb against the plain of Will’s palm, and Will makes a soft, shuddering sound. There’s a glassy look in Will’s eyes, and it looks like pain.

“You’re in love with me,” Will says, then.

“Yeah,” Matthew says, and he puts one of Will’s hands to his face, twitches a sad smile against the side of it. He can feel Will’s pulse on his cheek. “I am.”

Because he is. He always has been, ever since he had read stories about Will Graham, ever since he watched Will Graham at the hospital.

Matthew lets go of Will’s wrist.

Will doesn’t say anything. Matthew doesn’t expect him to. This isn’t the time or the place for this conversation. They have their nightmares and their nemeses. The separate architectures of their mind, no matter how much they can slot in place. This isn’t Matthew’s legend, and it isn’t _their_ legend.

He goes back inside the house, leaving Will with the blanket.

 


	11. Chapter 11

Will Graham is dead.

The body they lay in the coffin is wearing a sharp black suit that Will has never worn once in his life. Abigail Hobbs had worn a snow white dress that Alana had picked out for her, the lace arranged just _so_ to cover the scars on her throat. Beverly Katz - as Jack Crawford had told Will, relating her funeral with a pinched, impassive expression - had worn a simple white shroud, hemp ribbons in her hair, for all the grim, formal presence of the FBI.

Ardelia Mapp remarks to Will that they held a funeral _in absentia_ for Miriam Lass, even without a body. Miriam Lass’ name is still on the memorial wall in Quantico. It’s almost darkly humorous to think that Will must have passed it every day that he had taught at the academy.

The John Doe in the casket bears an uncanny resemblance to Will, and it doesn’t help that the task force has enlisted the help of a prosthetic makeup artist.

They had been careful to drag this out. Let the rumors filter in whispers, fuelled by Freddie Lounds. The slow, cautious process of a supposed autopsy and funeral planning. There is no family that could come for Will, so Alana and Jack seem to be in charge of it, with the Vergers’ financial contributions. There isn’t an official press release, because the task force isn’t supposed to care about a man who isn’t a part of it any more. It hasn’t been ruled a homicide, after all. It isn’t directly related.

Ettore De Angelis makes a comment that it’s a tragedy that they lost a witness, especially someone as vital to the investigation as Will Graham, but he has recordings of him recounting everything he knows. He says that the public shouldn’t bother poking their noses into the death: “It’s disrespectful. Hannibal Lecter is still on the run, and I think that Mr. Graham would prefer that the public paid more attention to that. He should be mourned for the service he has done, but the search isn’t over yet.”

Those invested in the Chesapeake Ripper case, however, speculate freely.

 _Suicide_ is the most popular guess. Freddie Lounds chirps in with information about Will Graham’s spending habits and suggests _accidental_. Alcohol poisoning. Her vicious eagerness would be sickening if it isn’t actually productive. (“And how do you know the brand of whiskey I buy?” “I do my research, Graham.”)

Death certificates in Virginia aren’t made public for twenty-five years. Only immediate family members are allowed access. It wouldn’t be too hard to produce one to be ‘leaked’, but Lounds tells them that the rampant speculation probably works in their favor. Gives it an air of mystery. Obviously, Jack and Alana aren’t saying anything, out of professional respect.

Without a doubt, Hannibal Lecter will notice the ruckus, no matter what country he’s holed up in.

 

* * *

 

Will won’t be allowed inside the funeral home. There’s too much of a chance that Hannibal will recognize him. But Jack agrees that he deserves to be present, and Will is relegated to staking out the bus stop outside with one of his bodyguards. He wonders if the bodyguard is there to protect him, or to prevent him from entering, or both.

Before he goes, Matthew lends him a burgundy hooded sweatshirt. It’s an item that he has recently bought, because he had needed clothes of his own to wear. He is shorter than Will, and more muscular, younger, and he settles more comfortably into casual clothes of his choice that fit him.

“He knows what kind of clothes you have,” Matthew says. “Your fishing jackets, your plaid shirts. Try this.”

Will reaches for the sweatshirt, grasps one of the sleeves. The hoodie is between them, Matthew angling the bundle into Will’s arms. It’s a token, a gesture, of _something_ that Will can’t pinpoint or comprehend, and he accepts it and realizes that if Hannibal Lecter passed him by he would smell like Matthew Brown instead. Hannibal Lecter would not recognize this. Their confrontation was nothing but the scents of chlorine and blood and the sterile trace of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

“ _Breathe_ , Will,” Matthew says. “You look stressed. I can read it off you - your body language.”

Will laughs. “Who in the world wouldn’t be distressed, in any shape or form, outside a funeral home, Matthew?”

“Your Judas is a bloodhound,” Matthew says. “You’ve laid your red herring. The kipper for the hunting dog. But hunting dogs can be diverted if they catch a stronger scent.”

A fish metaphor, the same one that Will had used earlier. Matthew has picked it up from Will. The thought of this doesn’t terrify Will, doesn’t make him think that he’s intruding. He gives Matthew a smile that is parts rueful and amused, and he slips the hoodie on.

Matthew’s eyes roam over Will again, and he says, with a sigh, “Relax, Mr. Graham. You’re usually very good with your body language, but it’s getting to you today.”

Matthew walks over to the dusty wooden piano in the room. Puts a finger on the lid. “Come here. Play that song that was composed for that killer. The one that you were humming to me.”

“This isn’t the time for--”

“Sit down,” Matthew says, firmly.

Will sits on the piano bench, but not without an aggravated, long-suffering glare. Matthew settles next to him. “I can’t play,” he says, quietly. “I told you.”

It was his father who could play, improvised arias and ragtime tunes. They couldn’t take a piano with them everywhere they traveled, but he tried to get his hands on one wherever they went. Whether it meant playing the organ in church after mass was over, his weathered workman’s hands stroking the keys. Whether it meant befriending the music teacher at one of Will’s schools, swapping jazz melodies and speaking in terms that Will couldn’t understand.

But Will plays, anyway. He remembers the sheet music which he had presented for classroom slideshows, on the screen for just a second, but it had become imprinted in his mind. The song his hands produce is clumsy and discordant, the notes tripping against each other. It’s desperate and buoyant and frantic, some of the keys need to be tuned--

He doesn’t think that he plays the piano like his father or like Hannibal Lecter, who once sat down at the elegant black piano at his house and showed him. _Vesna svyashchennaya_. _The Rite of Spring_ , Hannibal said, in that candid voice of his. Over dinner, Hannibal had whispered regretfully of the sacrifice of the chosen girl. He hadn’t said Abigail Hobbs’ name, but it was there, one of the worst lies that he had ever told, while Will had only listened and ate.

This piece is no _The Rite of Spring._ It does not have the fabled reputation of provoking a riot because of a dissonance or a pulsating rhythm, a fluttering score that caused an outrage. It is a near-forgotten jazz song, a reaction to brutal attacks. The murderer had sent a letter - ‘They have never caught me and never will’ - and the city of New Orleans had mobilized, roaring with jazz music and blared mirth, hymns to a man who claimed to be a spirit and a demon. No one had died that night, but he was never caught. And from that thought, Will’s hands shape images across the black and white keys: 1919 and a frenetic hope and the music never ending.

When Will finishes playing, Matthew is watching him, thoughtful and pleased and radiant, as if Will has played a goddamn masterpiece.

“Look,” Matthew says.

When Will looks down on his hands, they are measured and flowing and loosened. His body has followed suit. He says, “So we don’t need a river for this.”

Matthew shrugs. “We never did. You never did. It was just a conduit. A channel. But that’s what I am, Mr. Graham, in the end. It’s like I told you in the hospital: _It was in you._ ”

Always too much faith from this one.

Will’s fingers crawl at the keys, trills the first notes from _The Rite of Spring._ He thinks of Hannibal’s face when he was playing, still and full of concentration. The purposeful cacophony of the notes. But he thinks of Alana’s face. Jack. Abigail. Beverly. Miriam. Ardelia. Margot. The list goes on and doesn’t stop. He stops playing, and Matthew Brown reaches to tangle his fingers in the white strings of the red sweatshirt. Their heads are close together, nearly brushing.

He says to Will, “Just the other day, Ettore De Angelis refuted Nietzsche when I tried to use a quote. ‘He who fights monsters.’” Matthew puts emphasis on the title with conscientious gravity.

“‘He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,’” Will completes. He tilts his head. It could be his job description. “I know it.”

“You won’t,” Matthew says, like it’s a simple truth. He bares his teeth and says, “Neither of us will.”

 

* * *

 

When Ardelia Mapp asks Will who he thinks deserves to make the collar, his gaze flickers over to the other task force members, and he says, “Let this one go to the home team, Mapp.”

He is not present at the viewing, but he knows how the pieces slot into place.

Hannibal Lecter enters the room when it’s nearly empty, surrounded by black-clad mourners who have guns tucked into hidden holsters and handcuffs at their belts. They are posing as newspaper readers, fans of the case, family members of the Chesapeake Ripper’s victims. People who didn’t know Will Graham as he lived. Those who knew him have already arrived and departed: Jack Crawford, Bella Crawford, Alana Bloom, Margot Verger, Miriam Lass...

Hannibal will keep his face hidden; he will be alert for suspicious activity. But pollen is swirling in the air, the pungent scent of flowering bouquets - Alana’s suggestion, so he won’t smell the telltale gunpowder - and he doesn’t see.

He sees: Will Graham is just another victim of the Chesapeake Ripper, destroyed in another way. His sanity shattered and his principles in pieces. Will longs for their appointments, and he loses his grip on his identity and attacks Alana Bloom. He is forced to resign his half-mad chase across continents because he is exactly that: _mad._

Will Graham doesn’t know who he is. He came too close.

Hannibal Lecter knows Will’s smile, and his touch, and how his blood looked like on his hands. Perhaps it is not exactly lamenting, maybe it’s a reassurance: his betrayer is dead, and Hannibal has killed him, and he has to see it.

He knows each of Will Graham’s dogs by name. He knows how much Will loved Abigail Hobbs. He knows how Will had swallowed his food, and looked at him with half-lidded eyes, and how Will writhed when he forced the tube down his throat. I ruined you, I made you, Hannibal thinks. Change is instrumental in metamorphosis and Will Graham had felt a loss, too, when Hannibal had left.

He thinks: _For my enemy is dead--a man as divine as myself is dead._

Hannibal Lecter _cared_ for him.

Will knows that he had to use this. It should hurt, but he uses it.

Afterwards, Ardelia Mapp tells him that she was about to make the arrest, the first person to recognize Hannibal on the premises, but she decided to hold him down for the state trooper Officer Tom Stewart to cuff instead. _He’s the one who saw all that nasty shit in his basement_ , she reasons to Will. _I still got him, anyway, at least. For Mia. It still counts._

When Hannibal Lecter is escorted out of the funeral home, guns trained on him, Will rises from his seat by the bus stop. Pushes down the sweatshirt's hood.

Hannibal sees him. He is wearing all black. Will realizes that he has never seen Hannibal in black suits before. His hair is ruffled; Will guesses that he must have been wearing a hat, brim tipped forward, but it had been knocked aside.

The procession halts. It’s as if time is frozen and crystallized, the two of them facing each other.

“I thought you were dead,” Hannibal says, with a sad curve of a smile, and Will thinks of him covered in blood. Franklyn Froidevaux and Tobias Budge lying on the floor of his office.

“You came back,” Will says, quietly. Not an apology. Not a regret. Hannibal came back for him. Then he finds Beverly Katz in his voice: from his memories, from beyond the land of the living, and he says, “ _Gotcha._ ”

Hannibal seems to acknowledge the reference. His answering smile reads: _Fair enough_ , and he’s led away.

Later, they tell him that Hannibal left a single red rose on the coffin, prised between the corpse’s cold fingertips.

 

* * *

 

Alana hugs him when he returns to the task force headquarters, and presses a kiss to his forehead. She’s still wearing her black funeral dress, but she’s lustrous, glowing. Will holds her by her elbows, and kisses her back.

She snorts at the hooded sweatshirt he’s wearing. “Jesus, Will, you look like a teenager.”

Jack shakes Will’s hand and smiles, a smile that is more alive than Will has ever seen from him.

They won. It’s over.

That night, Will dreams of Abigail Hobbs’ smile, and the other child that he had lost.

 

* * *

 

The arduous trial process in Maryland begins. Arraignment and motions and discovery. Bedelia Du Maurier has not been found. Hannibal doesn’t say anything about her whereabouts when asked, and the FBI continues to print out Wanted posters. She is smarter than any of them gave her credit for. The task force doesn’t know if she can be baited, if she can be lured, and Will realizes that if she wants to remain undiscovered, she’ll remain undiscovered.

Matthew isn’t going to stay for the trial.

Will finds this out when he sees Matthew sitting on the front porch of his house, a packed bag at his side. Matthew is murmuring to Sheila and Buster, and Will overhears him say goodbye. He is taking the offer that Will outstretched to him earlier. He’s leaving.

There’s a full moon in the sky.

“Ettore has all the evidence he needs,” Matthew says, not looking up from Buster’s paw, which he’s shaking. “You know that he has enough. I’m a shady character. If he needs me, he’s got recordings, and I signed a statement. I’m not one to wait out this long-ass trial of the century.”

“You’re leaving,” Will says. The statement sounds flat.

“You had your turn, Mr. Graham,” he replies. “And I’ll have mine. I can think like him, and I know him, and I’ll go find him myself. I’m the only one who can.”

Matthew Brown’s dragon, his monster of the abyss.

Will says sharply, “You do know how your last attempt to hunt someone down turned out.”

“This isn’t hunting,” Matthew says. “This isn’t fighting. A citizen’s arrest, Mr. Graham. It’s not all about hangings.”

Matthew continues, “I’ve tipped off law enforcement authorities. They know his name and face. His DNA is in the system because he was in the army. But they have no idea where he could possibly be. I might have an idea or two. Just following the moon, like he does. Following William Blake artifacts and archives. _I can find him._ ”

Matthew releases his grasp on Buster’s paw. He turns to stare at Will. He stands up, shrugging the duffel bag over his shoulder. Will returns Matthew’s gaze, and lets out a breath.

All right. Matthew Brown will go. He wants to, and he knows what he has to do. This isn’t Matthew Brown’s house. It’s Will’s. This was only a refuge, a stop on the road, before he knew what to do with his own understanding, before he knew that he had to rid himself of his own monster.

 _Did I inspire you, Matthew Brown?_ he thinks, and not without amusement.

And: _Did you inspire me?_

(Did he? Did he hold Will’s hands and walk him through his river? Did he show Will how stability looked like, so Will can reach for it for himself? Did he tell Will to conjure up a scheme, to make music, and to breathe?)

Matthew says, quietly, “I’ll come back, Will. You know, he doesn’t have an anchor point.”

_\--but I do._

Will thinks, _He..._

Matthew touches the side of Will’s face before he can finish his train of thought, rubbing a thumb against a curl of his hair. He touches Will carefully, tenderly, that orderly with the gentlest touch compared to the others.

Matthew Brown knows what understanding is. The exhilaration and the catharsis of closing around a phantom that’s haunted you for so long, the emotions that wound around Will and became his life. It’s a mantra that echoed within Will more than the one that Hannibal had taught him: _I want to end this. I need to end this._

And Will says, “Catch him.”

Matthew gives Will a smile, a dip of a bow, and he leaves. Will’s eyes stay on his back. He is trailing after the full moon as if it’s his lodestar.

 

* * *

 

They, the witnesses, have a right to face the accused, but they don’t. Will thinks that enough has been said in their testimonies already, and the others seem to agree with him. Even Alana, who had wanted to rage at him, to ask him why, only gazes at him, stony-faced.

Hannibal Lecter eventually takes up lodgings in a federal prison, where he’ll serve out his life sentences given out by the federal government, Maryland, Minnesota, and Virginia. The federal government and Virginia had dropped the death penalty when he decided to plead guilty. Ever since he lost his insanity plea in Maryland, he chose not to put up a fight in the other courts.

Ettore De Angelis invites witnesses, attorneys, and former task force members to a bar in Maryland.

Not all of the major players come. Margot Verger sends a bottle of whiskey in her place. The former officer Stewart has his motel business to manage, and instead tells them that they’re always welcome to a free room whenever they’re in town. Freddie Lounds doesn’t bother to give notice. Will finds out later that Lounds had married her longtime girlfriend Wendy. She was honeymooning in Las Vegas, where she somehow became embroiled in a scandal involving a casino, a senator, and organized crime, which she gleefully reports onto TattleCrime.

Matthew Brown hasn’t come back.

But most of them are there, sitting around a table, drinking and grinning and telling stories.

Jimmy Price and Brian Zeller leave a chair open for Beverly Katz, and they ramble about scientific subjects that barely anyone else at the table can decipher. Miriam Lass gets the most drunk out of all of them, her head lying in Ardelia Mapp’s lap while she laughs brightly and cheerfully. Ettore De Angelis is a talkative drunk, his speech occasionally slipping into slurred Italian. He had somewhat ‘befriended’ Hannibal during the trial, falling into the same type of conversations that Will had with him in the past: metaphor and poetry and philosophy and theology. He’s still prosecuting cases as if he won’t ever grow any older.

Jack Crawford has retired as an FBI agent, dedicating his time to taking care of his wife. Sometimes he lectures at Quantico, where Miriam is finishing her courses. Ardelia has moved to Virginia to be close to her; she is stationed at the field office in Richmond. All of them come over to visit Will, occasionally - Rocky, the dog that Will had given Miriam, likes to come back and play with the other dogs.

Will refuses to consult on cases; he’s back to teaching. It’s Alana Bloom who isn’t teaching any more. She has written a book about the Chesapeake Ripper case, which managed to top Freddie Lounds’ on the New York Times’ Bestsellers List. It isn’t an intensely personal account, but detached and professional, a concise overview of the entire case, the complicated twists and turns of it. She tells Will that she wants to write another book about her own part in it, but she doesn’t think that she’s ready yet.

Right now, she is smiling at him and they make easy eye contact without any trouble. He had found out recently that she knows how to fish - she had went fishing several times when she was younger, but not much in adulthood - and they’ve spent mornings sitting by their poles. She says that she wants to write a book about him, too, but _neither_ of them are ready for that.

Hannibal Lecter will send all of them letters, but they will hand them over to Ettore De Angelis. He will visit Hannibal in the penitentiary, leave the letters strewn out on the table between them, and level each word as a judgment: “ _They’ll forget you, you know,”_ before exiting.

Sometimes, during nights of the full moon, Will sits on the steps of his front porch. He listens to his dogs’ songs, and waits for Matthew Brown to return.

Will still dreams of the river. He runs along the edge of it, bare feet on the stones, and he feels the water lapping at his toes. The sun is out, shining, and a water bug lazily buzzes past him. He dreams that he lays down in the reeds, and he sleeps.

 


End file.
